“I’ll still put a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker on my car, but a lot of people won’t,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a Democratic think tank not aligned with any candidate. “They’ll say ‘I don’t like Donald Trump, but I don’t like Sanders either. We survived four years of Trump, maybe we’ll survive another four years.’ They’ll stay home, vote third party, or vote for Trump.”
An insider working with Mike Bloomberg’s campaign agreed: “I think that there is a very real ‘Never Bernie’ sentiment amongst both the donor class and moderate, centrist Democrats, or what I would call regular Democrats. Bloomberg and Pete [Buttigieg] and [Joe] Biden, who represent the heart and soul of the party — their supporters are not as apt to support someone like Bernie.”…
“For Democrats to win, the election must be a referendum on Trump and not a debate about socialism,” Michael Kempner, a longtime Democratic donor who has cut checks for Biden and Buttigieg, told The Post. “The vast majority of Democrats and the nation do not believe in socialism.”
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