A movement opposing former Vice President Joe Biden ever being the Democratic presidential nominee has sprung up online after his recent primary victories over his closest rival, Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Biden won several states’ primaries on Tuesday, ending the night well ahead of Sanders. The next morning, the hashtags “NeverBiden,” “WriteinBernie” and “DemExit2020” started trending on Twitter.
The Brookings Institution’s Rashawn Ray noted to The Guardian that Sanders supporters tend to distrust the Democratic Party, saying, “if you distrust something, you are more likely to opt out of it. They think its political sabotage, and not allowing Bernie to have a fair shot. So what do people do? They opt out.”
One Sanders supporter, 54-year-old writer and progressive activist Alyson Metzger of New York City, told Politico that “the rationale for us is that our votes need to be earned and that we’ve been taken for granted, and the party never moves to us. If they install Joe Biden, I will not vote for Biden. … This is not democratic what’s happening in the Democratic primary.”
Others question whether Biden is more electable than Sanders, one of the former vice president’s key selling points, since he lags behind the senator in support from young voters.
Evan Weber, the national director of the youth-oriented climate change activist group the Sunrise Movement, added that “there’s lots of narratives about why [2016 Democratic presidential nominee] Hillary Clinton lost the election, but one undeniable one is that she did not mobilize the young people who turned out for [former President Barack] Obama in 2012 and especially 2008. We hear a lot from pundits about Joe Biden being Obama’s vice president and him being able to recreate the Obama coalition, but one of the core and critical components of the coalition was young people.”