Bernie Sanders For President, Still? The Long-Shot Campaign To Write In Sanders May Have Just Gotten A Huge Boost

A movement to write in Bernie Sanders for president may have started as something of a pipe dream for the most fervent of Sanders supporters, but early results from one unlikely state shows that it is actually gaining traction.

Supporters of the Vermont Senator have been pushing the idea of writing his name in on the ballot on Election Day, and apparently the message is being heard. Salt Lake City outlet KUTV reported this week that dozens of Utah early voting ballots have come back with Bernie Sanders written in.

The exact number of votes for Sanders isn’t known, but highly conservative Utah isn’t exactly seen as Sanders country, so any number of votes for him could be a good sign for the long-shot write-in campaign.

The campaign to write in Bernie Sanders for president is still a very small movement, made up mostly of the Bernie of Bust crowd that has refused to migrate to Hillary Clinton. It gained more steam as plans to write in Sanders were discussed online, though even its adherents admit that it would be a long shot.

Alex Garofalo of the International Business Times went into exactly what it would take and the almost impossibly small path for Bernie Sanders. Gone right away are the states that forbid all write-in candidates entirely — Hawaii, Nevada, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. On top of that there are another 34 states where candidates must file paperwork if they want to be eligible for write-in votes. Bernie hasn’t done that.

So Bernie Sanders has only eight states where he would be eligible to receive votes. Garofalo’s report (via Raw Story) noted that it would be a sliver of the electorate where Bernie Sanders can legally register votes.

But Sanders could steal some states. Seven states do not require any pre-registration for write-in candidates. Voters in New Jersey, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Iowa, Oregon, and the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania can cast their vote for Sanders, or anyone else, and make it count.

Even if Bernie Sanders were to somehow win each of those states, it would still put him behind the 270 electoral votes needed to win. So his path instead would have to rely on both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump failing to reach the threshold, which is looking less and less likely as Trump continues to collapse and Clinton opens up battlegrounds in traditionally red states. That plan would also require Congress to vote on the next president, with each state voting as a delegation, and Bernie Sanders would likely not be anyone’s top pick.

There are some other obvious flaws to the plan, including Sanders throwing his full support behind Hillary Clinton and hitting the campaign trail on her behalf. While his primary battle with Clinton may be hard-fought, Sanders appears to have put it behind him and has his eyes on another prize, a blowout so big in November, it would turn the Senate back to the Democrats and put him in line for a big promotion.

As House Speaker Paul Ryan noted in trying to fire up his conservative base, Bernie Sanders could be a very important man after Election Day.

“If we keep control of the Senate in the Republican hands, a nice guy named Mike Enzi from Wyoming is the Senate budget chair and he helps us get these budgets to the president’s desk, gets these tax bills through,” Ryan said via Roll Call. “If we lose the Senate, do you know who becomes chair of the Senate Budget Committee? A guy named Bernie Sanders. You ever heard of him?”

The early results from Utah show that the Bernie Sanders write-in campaign is at least gaining some traction, even if it will go nowhere. Utah happens to be one of the states that require write-in candidates to register, so all of the votes for him will be wasted.

But if nothing else, the early success of the campaign to write in Bernie Sanders and the positive results in Utah shows that the Vermont Senator is still wildly popular with his supporters, and could play a key role in leading the Democratic Party after the election.

[Featured Image by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images]