‘I guess if you hold a gun to my head.’ Sanders voters in NC come to terms with Biden

Sen. Bernie Sanders urged his supporters Monday night to unite behind Joe Biden, telling a virtual Democratic National Convention that the price of losing to President Donald Trump this time is unthinkable.

“My friends, I say to you,” the former presidential candidate said, “to everyone who supported other candidates in the primary and to those who may have voted for Donald Trump in the last election: The future of our democracy is at stake. The future of our economy is at stake. The future of our planet is at stake.”

If interviews with nine Sanders supporters in North Carolina are any guide, even Sanders’ most passionate supporters don’t need much convincing — although some feel like they’re being forced to choose among bad options.

“I guess if you hold a gun to my head, Biden,” said Anna Brigevich of Carrboro, until recently a political science professor at N.C. Central University, on whether she plans to vote for Trump, Biden or neither.

That stance sums up how most of the Sanders supporters The News & Observer interviewed over the summer feel about President Barack Obama’s vice president.

Almost all said they would vote for Biden – but reluctantly or with reservations. One said he is leaning toward voting for neither Biden nor Trump.

That sentiment of widespread support for Biden on the left seems to hold true in six battleground states, according to New York Times/Siena College polls from July.

What polls show

Only 21% of Sanders voters, and 40% of Sen. Elizabeth Warren supporters, have a “very favorable” view of Biden. In comparison, Biden primary supporters say they have a very favorable view of the candidate at a 77% clip.

And Sanders voters say by a 69% to 26% margin their vote is more a vote against Trump than for Biden.

But they plan to back Biden in November, whether enthusiastically or not, according to the same poll of swing states. Those voters said they support Biden over Trump 87-4. Warren supporters were even more strongly in favor of Biden, 96-1.

Among all voters, an East Carolina University poll from this month shows Biden and Trump dead even in North Carolina at 47% each.

Biden looks to be holding off a mutiny by the progressive wing of the party, even after his pick of Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate. Her background as a prosecutor turns off some on the left.

A longtime Sanders supporter

Rob Davis, a bartender and part-time boxing instructor in Chapel Hill, dips a sponge in a bucket of soapy water on a warm day. He puts the sponge to a black sedan’s quarter panel.

Davis, 55, didn’t qualify for a coronavirus stimulus check this spring and needed a way to raise money over the lockdown, so he returned to what he did to earn money as a child. He set up a car wash behind the bar where he works, The Baxter, the arcade that sells alcohol just off Franklin Street.

“For me, it’s simple,” Davis said, “I’m voting against Trump. It’s really important. Biden is not my choice. He’s not even my 10th choice on the Democratic side.”

But Davis, a Sanders supporter for 25 years, says he will vote for Biden nonetheless and has some strong opinions about Sanders supporters who don’t plan to vote for Biden.

“There’s two people in this country that have a chance to be president,” he said, “that’s Joe Biden and Donald Trump. If you vote for anyone else you’re throwing away your vote.”

As for Bernie supporters who plan to vote for a third party candidate or not vote at all? “‘My (expletive) feelings are hurt.’ That’s what it’s about,” he said.

Davis said he has never trusted the two-party system. He remembers seeing Sanders on TV years ago and noticed the (I) by his name for independent, which caught his interest.

He said this is the last time he plans to vote for a Democratic National Committee-backed establishment candidate. He sees Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known primarily as a proponent of “The Green New Deal,” as the future of the Democratic Party.

Davis said he’s a strong proponent of unions and strikes.

He hasn’t been impressed with Biden’s coronavirus response, but on the George Floyd protests, the second crisis that has rocked the nation since Sanders suspended his campaign in April, he does give Biden credit for saying “Black lives matter,” especially when Trump refuses to.

‘People understand the stakes’

Support for Sanders runs deep in Carrboro. Two Carrboro council members endorsed Sanders during the primary, Damon Seils and Sammy Slade. Both said they would vote for Biden in the general election, Seils more begrudgingly than Slade.

Seils backed Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primaries. The campaign was looking for local politicians to stump for Sanders in this year’s primary, and Seils spoke up.

He said he was impressed with Sanders’ ability to work with a bottom-up movement, and saw that Sanders was attracting a lot of diversity, including a lot of first-time voters, younger voters and voters of color.

His top priority now that Sanders has suspended his campaign is to get rid of Trump, and although he has major problems with Biden, he says if voting for him means getting rid of Trump, that’s what he plans to do.

Seils also expects more of his fellow Sanders backers will vote Democratic this time than in 2016. “I think people understand the stakes,” he said.

But Seils said he hasn’t really paid attention to Biden’s campaign recently, thinking it just takes away from more important issues. He planned to primarily work to move the party platform to the left.

Slade is more generous when talking about Biden. He has seen the candidate move toward some of Sanders’ positions and feels some hope that Biden would govern more from the left than his long record might suggest. He said he’s heartened by the fact that though Biden gathered more delegates, exit polls also showed support for Sanders’ policies.

Slade also supported Sanders in 2016 and 2020, and agrees with Seils that Sanders supporters are more likely to vote for Biden this time around than they were for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 because they understand the stakes better after one term of Trump.

Michael Matthews, a history professor at Elon University who lives in Durham, said as reporting for this article began several weeks ago that he was leaning toward leaving the presidential slot blank and voting for down-ballot candidates.

Now Matthews says he is leaning toward voting for Biden. The thought of another conservative Supreme Court justice, and especially the possibility of the court overturning Roe v. Wade, has swayed him.

Matthews is originally from Vancouver, Canada, and this will be the first election he has been eligible to vote in as a new citizen.

“I get that Trump is a monster,” he said, “but I do get tired of awful candidates. Every four years there’s a gun to our heads saying you better vote for our crappy neoliberal candidate.”

He said he was not impressed with Biden’s pick of Harris as his running mate. He would have preferred Stacey Abrams, the Democratic Party’s nominee in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, or California Rep. Karen Bass, a proponent of sweeping police reform.

He and others interviewed who were on the fence about Biden agreed that Harris’ selection was not a major factor for them.

Kerwin Pittman, a social activist who led the Raleigh protests in response to Floyd’s death, said before the Harris pick that if Biden chose her it would cost the candidate his vote. After she was named Biden’s running mate, however, he changed his tune, saying it is too important to defeat Trump not to vote for Biden.

“I just hope Kamala’s criminal justice reform policies reflect what she says,” Pittman said, “her and Joe.”

Matt Goad is a Triangle freelance writer. Reach him at MattGoad@gmail.com.

This story was originally published August 20, 2020 at 1:24 PM.