Team Bernie Isn’t Fazed by the Bros

At least one Sanders fan—Jim Rock, an arborist from Ames—outright rejected the idea that the candidate’s voters have been responsible for online harassment. “It’s not true,” Rock said matter-of-factly. “It’s all a corporate, made-up lie.” And a significant number of the supporters I talked with hadn’t heard about Bernie bros at all. “It sounds like it’s a Twitter phenomenon?” Michael Halloran, who lives in Des Moines, told me with a confused look. “Neither of us are on Twitter,” he added, gesturing to his wife, “so we’ve not seen any of that.”

Their lack of awareness makes sense, says Deen Freelon, a University of North Carolina professor who studies political expression through digital media. “One thing observed in research about online harassment is it really doesn’t take that many people to have a very large impact, even if it was just a small portion of Bernie’s audience that was doing this.”

Ultimately, Freelon said, it’s a numbers game. “Sanders’s online audience is much, much larger than Elizabeth Warren’s or Joe Biden’s by an order of several million,” he added. Since early 2019, Facebook pages supporting Sanders, for example, have generated more than 290 million interactions, while pages for Warren and Biden have generated 20 million and 9 million interactions, respectively, according to one analysis. “You get a larger group, there’s going to be more douchebags in it than the smaller group,” Freelon said.

Still, there is a real risk that—if enough people hear about them—the online attacks could scare off voters at a time when the stakes are especially high for Sanders. With three days to go until the Iowa caucuses, the Vermont senator is among the Democratic-primary leaders, but no contender’s status is locked in. And down the line, if Sanders wins the party nomination, he will have to persuade supporters of his erstwhile opponents to back him in November. That task will be much more difficult if those people view Sanders’s backers as bullies.

Sheng Ly, who works in IT at Iowa State University, laughed dryly when I asked him about the idea that Sanders followers have formed an online army. “They don’t see what other people see in Bernie,” Ly said, referring to the candidate’s critics. “When they use that terminology, it’s their way of being dismissive of all that Bernie has done and all the people that support him.”

Elaine Godfrey is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.