Julia Ioffe is contributing writer at Politico Magazine.

KENT, OHIO—A lonely Hillary supporter stood with a sign outside the rec center at Kent State University on Saturday, a gray and muggy afternoon for a rally. “INSECURE, SMALL PENISED WHITE GUYS FOR TRUMP!!!” his sign read. Near him, grizzled men in fatigues and sunglasses and a fraternity brother held pro-Trump signs. But the main swirl of activity ahead of Bernie Sanders’ speech in this Ohio college town was the dozen fervent Jill Stein supporters, formerly fervent Bernie supporters, holding signs and signing up volunteers. “We have a better choice,” one sign—puffy paint on rumpled printer paper—said.

“The two-party system is messed uuuup!” sang Patty Friedrich, a local Green Party organizer, as she pranced around, handing out fliers to people going to the rally. “Embrace the suuuuuck!”


“I think our democracy is over after this election,” said Kristyn Nye, who works in marketing. “It doesn’t matter who wins.” Bernie had opened her eyes, she said, and when he left the race, she was bereft of choice and angered by his speech at the Democratic National Convention in July. “He should’ve just dropped the mic,” Nye said. “I wish he would’ve just stuck it to them. What does he have to lose? People in Vermont love him!”

After a rally in Akron, Bernie Sanders had arrived in Kent on a mission that might be critical to the election: coaxing disaffected Ohioans not just to vote, but to vote for the woman whom he’d been calling corrupt just a few months ago. With Donald Trump moving up in the polls—and even, according to some polls, leading in this crucial swing state—the Clinton campaign sent in the reinforcements: Bernie Sanders. Hillary for America, which organized the event, was evidently hoping that Sanders, with his anti-establishment appeal and image of fiery authenticity, could bring his herd—and maybe a few stragglers—more securely into the fold. But it was not clear how well it was working: Nye had internalized Bernie’s message so fully that she had decided to vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate.

She was for Jill mostly because she disliked Hillary, who voted for the war in Iraq, is constantly surrounded by scandal and, in Nye’s view, “doesn’t stand for anything.” She also may or may not have Parkinson’s. “But I know a person with Parkinson’s, and I don’t know how she would be able to control the shakes,” Nye muses out loud. “She would have to be on so many drugs that she’d be so out of it, but she seems sharp. How does she do it?”

Maybe she just doesn’t have Parkinson’s? I offered.

Nye blinked at me, not understanding.

“She’s just so untrustworthy, that I just don’t know,” she finally responded. “Is it pneumonia?”

And another thing, Nye said. Clinton wants to start a war with Russia, which she heard on Russia Today. When I pointed out that this was a channel paid for exclusively by the Kremlin, she wondered how that was any different from, say, NPR.

She wasn’t going to the rally inside the rec center to hear Bernie speak, and neither were the other Bernie diehards there that day. “Why? To hear a man who sold his soul?” said Michele Bline, 54, a disabled veteran of Desert Storm.

“Bernie sold ooouuuut!” sang Friedrich nearby. “They threatened his familyyy!”

“We’ve heard it all before,” Bline went on. “We know where he stands,”

“He’s not going to sway me,” a grad student named Gwen West chimed in.

Inside, past the humming treadmills and clanging weights, on the far edge of the basketball courts, walled off from the dribblers and dunkers by a wall of semi-transparent white netting, Sanders stood slouching over the lectern, his rumpled pants falling on clunky black shoes, holding forth to a crowd of about 300. A Sanders rally of yore this was not. Earlier that day in Akron, only about 150 came out to hear the old prophet of political revolution. Here, he tried to fulfill his promise to do whatever he could to prevent Trump from being president. To cheers and finger snaps, he talked about the man’s bigotry and “the so-called Bertha movement.”

“Now let me be very clear about what the Bertha movement really is,” he went on in his Brooklyn accent about the faux controversy Trump spawned about Obama’s provenance. “It’s not about disagreeing with Obama—you can disagree any time you want. What they were trying to do, led by Donald Trump, is to delegitimize the presidency of the first black president we have ever had. ... What an outrage! What a racist attack!”

“This is an enormously, enormously, enormously important election,” he pressed on, the crowd beaming up at him. “And for those of your friends who say, ‘Well, I don’t like anybody, I’m not going to vote’ ... ask your friends why the Koch brothers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars if this election is not important.” It took him a while to get around to saying it, but he did: “Hillary Clinton believes as I believe” that the minimum wage must be raised, that women should control their own bodies, that “our gay brothers and sisters have the right to get married.” “You have to do everything you can to make sure that Secretary Clinton and [Democratic Senate candidate] Ted Strickland win in this state!”

Afterward, he was mobbed for handshakes and selfies.

“Did you get to shake his hand?” Lorie Sewell, a local teacher, asked her husband Jim.

“Twice!” Jim grinned.

They had voted for Bernie in the primaries and were still fans, but, said Jim, who teaches at Kent State, “there was no convincing necessary” to get them to support Clinton. He went on, “We would’ve rather voted for Bernie, but the choice is pretty darn clear.”

Three freshmen, Samantha, Quincy and Molly, were exhilarated by the various media interviews they had given after the rally, and their parents—it was parents’ weekend—waited patiently until they could get a bite to eat. The girls were all ardent Bernie supporters—and one of their dads was, too—but they liked Clinton fine, too. Their parents had supported her, and it was a natural switch for them. “I was always going to vote for Hillary if Bernie didn’t win,” Samantha said.

Nearby, three young female students, two of them black, told me they had voted for Bernie but were willing to support Hillary in order to keep Trump from being elected—which, one of them laughed, would usher in “World War 17.” They weren’t huge fans of Hillary and her “sketchy” history, but they understood the stakes and Sanders’s lobbying for her was compelling. “Bernie’s supporting her,” Kelyanne, a junior, said, “so there must be a side of her that’s good that we just don’t see.”

There was a small commotion in the wings—the student volunteers were meeting privately with Bernie, who thanked them for their support and took a group photo with them.

Afterward, two of them, both College Democrats who had voted for Bernie in the primaries, gushed about that moment. “He had his hand on his shoulder!” Brian DiPaolo said, pointing to his comrade Anthony Erhardt. They still loved Bernie, but the switch hadn’t been wrenching for them either. “I was never a Bernie-or-Buster,” said Erhardt. “It was not hard” to watch Bernie concede in Philadelphia and pass the baton to Clinton. “It was a celebratory moment,” he said. There are still some things on which Erhardt disagreed with Clinton, but ultimately, he said, “the pros outweigh the cons.”

“I’m voting for her because she’s more qualified,” DiPaolo said matter-of-factly, clearly proud of the maturity of his reasoning. “I like to say that we’re not selling out, we’re buying in.”

Sure, they had some friends who were holding out and planning on sitting out the election—all the students I talked to did—and they just hadn’t bothered to even come see Bernie that afternoon. This struck them all as “selfish” and “self-centered” and the people outside, the Jill Stein supporters, are “just doing harm to Bernie’s image.”

Or, as Erhardt put it, “I love Bernie, I still do. I just hate his supporters.”