“He isn’t an anti-capitalist! He is for reforming capitalism, not changing capitalism. He is really a lot closer in ideology to Hillary Clinton than he is to me,” said Stephen Durham, the 2012 presidential nominee of the Freedom Socialist Party. “His is the politics of a lesser evil among some very bad choices.”

“He is a progressive on the home front, but he is pretty reactionary when it comes to foreign policy,” says Gloria La Riva, the 2016 presidential nominee for the Party of Socialism and Liberation. “He supported the Israeli war against Gaza. He supports the drone bombing campaigns in other countries, which is a war crime. He has said that Cuba needs to be a democracy, but we believe Cuba already truly is a system for the people there.”

La Riva, a perennial vice-presidential candidate for the Workers World Party in the 1980s and ’90s (the PSL split from the WWP for reasons that remain largely unclear, even to its most committed partisans) said that even if Sanders won the Democratic nomination, she would continue to seek the presidency.

“I don’t think he is a socialist. He ignores socialist countries,” she said.