INQUISITR.COM / News & Politics

Worried The ‘Write In Bernie’ Campaign Will Get Trump Elected? Here’s How You Can Help

By Dawn Papple
Published on: 09:32 PST, Oct 8, 2016

Liberals are freaking out that #OpDeny270, the grassroots campaign to write-in Bernie Sanders in strategic states, could result in a President Trump. The shaming on social media directed towards supporters of the write-in strategy is incredibly unlikely to sway a Bernie voter though. People who have made up their mind to write in Bernie are not easily swayed in their decisions. It’s safe to say that nothing any liberal could say could change a Bernie voter’s mind.

See, you can’t scare a write-in Bernie voter with #AnyBlueWillDo shaming tactics. Many Berniecrats were never Democrats to begin with. Some are even traditionally GOP voters. Most of them are more scared of a President Clinton, because they know Clinton can accomplish most of her private objectives with virtually no recourse and consider Trump too unskilled to accomplish much of anything.

They also apparently now know, thanks to the newest WikiLeaks dump, that Hillary Clinton believes it’s OK to have different public and private positions on policy. Here’s a summary from another Inquisitr writer’s scathing op-ed report about Clinton’s alleged statements.

“First off, the stand out line: ‘You need both a public and a private position.’ She waffles on for a long-a** time basically making the case for telling a different story privately to donors to the one she tells us. It’s got references to Lincoln and everything. It’s a work of word-salad genius that amounts to a justification about why she lies to the public.

“In it, she makes it very clear that she’s loyal to her private policy positions and not to her public policy positions.”

The Inquisitr reported about a hypothetical situation in which Bernie Sanders could still become president just days before the strategic write-in plans began. Tweets featured strategic plans to write Bernie Sanders in as president within days of the article showing the hypothetical scenario which could result in a Sanders presidency. The early campaign kicked off with the hashtag #DenyEm270, but #OpDeny270 quickly became the seemingly preferred hashtag of the campaign.

Inquisitr explained that not every state that allows write-in votes will accept a vote for Bernie Sanders. There are some states that do actually allow write-in votes to count, even if the candidate did not register before the election. Daily Kos reported which specific states count votes for write-in candidates if the actual candidate does not register.

“Vermont, Wyoming, Oregon, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Iowa, Delaware, and Alabama do not require registration.”

Thousands of Vermonters had planned to write in their senator as their presidential pick long before #OpDeny270 kicked in, and the write-in campaign is only adding to Sanders’ likelihood of earning Vermont’s three electoral votes. According to Nate Silver’s latest projection, Clinton has the best chances of making it to 270 electoral votes at this point, one month before the election. Check out Silver’s map showing which candidate is most likely to win each state. Clinton is over 78 percent likely to win the presidency at this point.

If you want to stop Trump, rather than trying to convince Berniecrats to vote for Clinton, concerned liberals can actively work to deny Trump a victory, without risking throwing a single blue state to Trump.

How?

Let’s examine the states which, according to Daily Kos, are potential places for Sanders to earn electoral votes one more time. But this time, let’s focus only on the states that would, without an intervention like #OpDeny270, be handed to Trump.

Iowa could go either way, leaving Wyoming and Alabama as the Red states that allow previously unregistered write-in candidates to earn votes during the election.

That’s where the concerned liberals should be trying to sway votes: Wyoming and Alabama. Since #AnyBlueWillDo liberals will never convince Berniecrats to drop their strategy to send the election to the House of Representatives, they might as well be productive and join the efforts, focusing on the two states that allow it and are also shoo-ins for the GOP.

Wyoming offers three electoral votes. The liberals in the state overwhelmingly chose Bernie during their caucus and a mere 7 percent of the GOP caucus goers picked Trump. Simply put, Wyoming is in a significant position of power in this election and the two candidates chosen by the major parties were not their choice. That’s an exciting position for voters from Wyoming to be in.

Liberals who are scared of Trump would be more productive by focusing on grabbing those three electoral votes from Trump, and denying him the 270 electoral votes needed to win the desk in the Oval Office, especially since Berners are already canvassing Vermont with the #OpDeny270 agenda in hand.

Alabama would also be an option, but Trump was resoundingly popular in that Red state during its Super Tuesday primary. Alabama might be a waste of #OpDeny270’s energy.

Realistically, people who fear Trump have the best shot of preventing his presidency by focusing on preventing him from picking up a mere three electoral votes in Wyoming. Clinton could win by several or more electoral votes, but if Trump is going to win, it will be narrowly, and Wyoming could easily be the wrench in the gears of the electoral machine, if Trump was enjoying a narrow lead.

Berniecrats showed us the power of Facebanking this spring. Instead of heading to social media in hopes of convincing a #OpDeny270 supporter to vote for Clinton in order to defeat Trump, liberals could be spreading the word that Independents (and disheartened Republicans and Democrats) can write in Bernie in Wyoming. It’s as simple as searching Facebook for “Friends of my friends who live in Wyoming and like Bernie Sanders,” and sending a quick message to the people who show up in the search results instead of wasting time arguing with determined Berners on social media.

According to poll summaries by 270 To Win, nearly as many voters in Wyoming fall into the “other” category as those who said they would vote for Clinton when asked if they would vote for Trump, Johnson, Clinton, or Stein. More even fell into “other” than Johnson and Stein combined in Wyoming. Plus, according to a Washington Post/Survey Monkey poll, healthcare is the second most important issue to Wyoming voters. In that same poll, three-quarters said that a Clinton presidency would threaten the nation’s well-being and almost half in that state feel a Trump presidency would threaten the nation’s well-being.

Some people are saying that Bernie can’t take any electoral votes in Wyoming, but Wyoming election law indicates that he actually can. After #OpDeny270 earns him the potential three electoral votes, all he has to do is submit paperwork to accept them within two days of the election and pay a small processing fee.

Frankly, the write-in campaign is “berning hot” in states like Vermont and Oregon, so Trump opponents better get on the #OpDeny270 bus quickly to stop Trump in Wyoming. Short of election fraud, there is no chance Hillary could win The Equality State, but Bernie stands a chance to prevent Trump from getting to 270 by denying him Wyoming’s three electoral votes.

[Featured Image by Gage Skidmore | Flickr | Cropped and resized | CC BY-SA 2.0]

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