Believe it or not, I started out this primary season as neutral between Bernie and Hillary after taking a political quiz showing I agreed 98% with Bernie and 97% with Hillary. I decided to use the next few months to post positive and negative articles about both Bernie and Hillary, and gauge the reaction from my Facebook friends. Convince me your candidate is better worthy of my support, from electability to vision to realism to idealism to etc. (Yes, this was a very non-random sample of my Facebook friends who were passionate enough to respond to my posts.) I also studied what articles my friends were sharing on my newsfeed.
And barring a bizarro world scenario where Donald Trump decided to run as a Democrat, and then brought in all the racist whites with him for a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party, I was going to support the Democratic nominee in the general. I made that clear on Facebook from the beginning.
Based on the news cycles of the day, some days I'd be in a more pro-Bernie mood, other days I'd be in a more pro-Hillary mood, and other days I'd be feeling neutral about both of them. (The only time I really soured on a candidate personally, and not because of something their surrogates did, was with Hillary’s AIDS comments at Nancy Reagan’s funeral.)
As the campaign went on and voting started, I was seeing more and more posts about the election being "stolen" from Bernie supporters because the results didn't exactly match the polls, revealing a lack of understanding of what margin of error is, and what it is not. I tried explaining. Some of them pushed back, claiming to understand more about statistics than I do. (Pretty sure all of my friends on Facebook know that I have a Ph.D. in Statistics.) Even though they maybe took at most one stats class in their life. And oh, the condescension in their attitude as they said that. Nice job, guys.
Pro-tip: Calling me stupid and a fool is not a good way to convince me to support your candidate. There was one point I publicly declared I was leaning to Bernie, after Hillary's AIDS comments. Some of my very passionate Hillary friends reached out to me in private. Not to berate or question my intelligence, but to point out the good she's done with her record. See? It can be done without insults.
And then the posts about "the math" without understanding "the probability" behind those numbers. Like, when the Cavs were down by 33 points with one minute left to the Warriors on Sunday, mathematically, they hadn't yet lost the game because there was still time left on the clock. But probabilistically, and in reality, they had lost the game because the chance of coming back was infinitesimally small.
The posts about Bernie still getting the majority of pledged delegates got more and more bizarre, to the point where they were thinking somehow every single Hillary supporter would stay home and not vote or something to make her almost unviable (below 15%) in California. Yes, mathematically, that's not impossible. Realistically, however.............
Math and probability and statistics are part of the sciences. When you attack them because you don't like what they say, you're being anti-science. And as a statistician, that's the best way to turn me off to what you have to say. And then the crap that was thrown at other stats guys like Nate Silver, Harry Enten, Nate Cohn, and Sam Wang. Ugh. Just, ugh.
The increasing tinfoil level of conspiracy theories wasn't helping Bernie's cause either. From blaming Hillary's campaign for the Arizona Republicans' decision to slash polling locations, to complaints of voter suppression for California's No Party Preference rules, WHICH HAVE BEEN IN PLACE FOR DECADES, it became more and more like seeing the left-wing version of Alex Jones and Glenn Beck. And it wasn't a pretty sight.
And then a few posts by some Bernie friends of mine saying they'd vote FOR Trump over Hillary. (All of whom, I noted, were middle to upper-middle class straight white males.)
And that's not even getting into all the crap about superdelegates.
Nor is it even getting into the racial condescension I faced from some white Bernie supporters when I raised my own fears of a Trump presidency and the racial animus he's unleashed among his angry white base. Yeah, you're not the one who might get jumped in the street by his fans for having the wrong skin tone. I remember the Vincent Chin murder and the fear my parents felt, even if you don't.
So in the end, it surprisingly wasn't about policy or electability or any of that for me. It wasn't even about what Bernie or Hillary did 50 years ago, or even 5, 10, 20 years ago. It was arguments that were detached from reality from people denying math and probability, and ignoring the fears and concerns I have about Trump, that pushed me away from supporting Bernie. The PUMAs made Hillary look bad in 2008, and the Bernie Or Bust crowd makes Bernie look bad, like it or not. A few bad apples spoil the bunch.
And so today, I cast my vote for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.
tl;dr: A small but vocal contingent of Bernie fans pushed me away from supporting him by using non-sensical arguments and pushing all sorts of conspiracy theories.