Nicole Narea is an editorial intern at Politico.

When no calculus of delegate math could win Bernie Sanders the Democratic presidential nomination, his supporters waved their white flags, one by one. His lone Senate endorser, Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley, and his first congressional endorser, Arizona Representative Raúl Grijalva, fell into line in support of Hillary Clinton. Markos “Kos” Moulitsas, founder of the prominent liberal news site Daily Kos, ordered the Internet masses to “train your guns on the true enemy”—Donald Trump—“not each other.” And on Tuesday, the Vermont senator himself finally endorsed Clinton as the presumptive nominee.

But Sanders’ most dogged grassroots supporters have not disappeared.


They might have left the Daily Kos, but instead they’ve dispersed to more obscure, leftist corners of the Internet, where they are plotting their next moves. Taking up the hashtags #StillSanders and #NeverHillary, Sanders’ staunchest allies—who range from Democrats to Greens to unaffiliated renegades—are lurking in Reddit forums like “Kossacks_for_Sanders,” on emerging niche blogs such as Caucus99Percent and The Progressive Wing, and on YouTube vlogs like “The Sane Progressive,” where their fervor for the candidate and his progressive ideals is still very much alive.

In the wake of Sanders’ endorsement of Clinton (“the dreaded e-word,” as one Caucus99Percent blogger put it), their end game is no longer the White House—at least in this election cycle. But they still think their movement is viable, and they believe it will launch in earnest when they “occupy” the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia later this month to influence the party’s platform and pressure superdelegates to switch allegiance to Sanders. On postings around the Internet and interviews with Politico Magazine, they say that peaceful pro-Sanders protests at the convention, which have the support of more than 30,0000 Sanders voters on Facebook, will pave the way for future progressive candidates to run on grassroots funding.

The purists among these online activists describe their movement principally as one of populist ideals, including mass political mobilization, combating income equality, creating a more progressive tax system and stopping climate change. But a large faction of the movement is also made up of political misfits united in contempt for core elements of today’s Democratic Party: superdelegates, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, corporate media and money, what they believe to be widespread election fraud—and, of course, Clinton herself, despite her pending nomination. “What I hope Sanders’ fight does is mobilize the base to organize outside of the Democratic Party, which is and has been for years and obstacle to progressive change,” Joe Shikspack, founder of Caucus99Percent, told me in an interview in the days ahead of Sanders’ endorsement of Clinton.

Discussion forums on Reddit—the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet” where commenters have repeatedly voiced extreme political voices this election cycle—are the main information organ of #StillSanders. There is the subreddit thread “Sanders For President,” which has more than 230,000 followers and on Tuesday reacted with despair and disgust at Sanders’ endorsement of “$hillary,” as they have dubbed her. “[W]e’re left with a race between two liars,” user “Ruscer” wrote, “one who just recently was caught in a web of lies that she slithered her way out of using her power and influence, and the other a racist demagogue.” Another user, “ScrupulousVoter2,” expressed his disappointment in “our fellow Americans who chose a severely dishonest and flawed candidate over a true political unicorn.” Many others felt betrayed not only by the public, but by their candidate himself, who is “now just a liar and a sellout like everyone else,” wrote “Kuprog.” “This is the first time to my knowledge Bernie has lied to his supporters.” And yet in spite of their disillusionment, many still rejected overtures to vote for Clinton: “My answer,” user “rehi3” proclaimed, “will always be hell NO.”

On “Kossacks_for_Sanders”—a subreddit founded by user “mahakali overdrive,” who is actually a California-based humanities professor—commenters have slammed the Democratic Party’s support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, and rebuked the Justice Department’s decision not to indict Clinton for her use of a private email server at the State Department. Following Sanders’ endorsement of Clinton, some users demanded a “DemExit,” a formal renouncement of the Democratic Party à la “Brexit.” Mahakali overdrive herself, a lifelong Democrat, says she’s not only refusing to vote for Clinton—she will not vote for any politician who is “complicit in endorsing Clinton.” (When I emailed her, she did not want to be identified by name so as to seem politically impartial to her students.) “When I see the Clintonian dynastic corruption which seems to compromise everything and everyone it touches, the Democratic Party is not a party I can support at this time,” she told me.

The strain of Bernie-ism on forums like Kossacks_for_Sanders is distinct from its previous iterations during the Democratic primaries, such as that of the “Bernie Bro”—irritatingly fanatical men on social media who supported Sanders and opposed Clinton based on sexist cultural biases. The “Clinton hate” of today’s #StillSanders supporters can also be scathing: “sell-out corporatist whore oligarch” was one example that Daily Kos administrator Moulitsas cited in a post. But moderators of pro-Sanders sites, who espouse a philosophy grounded in textbook progressive ideals and tend to trend older, struggle to reckon with these messier, angrier members of their movement. They attempt to keep the discussion relatively clean and don’t necessarily identify fully with the vitriol, says Doug, a Portland-based user on Kossacks_for_Sanders working in software consulting. (He asked not to be named, citing concerns about his client relationships.) “It’s a frustrating part of our Reddit,” he adds.

In some cases, the “Clinton hate” manifests as conspiracy theories. Ran Flasterstein, an Ohio-based app developer and Sanders supporter on Reddit, claims that users on Sanders For President will “quickly speak up” about posts that are “misleading or incorrect in any way”—but the standard of proof is not always very rigorous. Earlier this month, a study climbed to the top of the forum’s page with hundreds of up-votes, suggesting that certain electronic voting machine companies were connected to Clinton Foundation donors and could have doctored Democratic primary results in Louisiana. “If cheating is not happening, there is something that is extremely worthwhile of serious investigation,” Rodolfo Cortes, a Stanford psychology graduate student and co-author of the study, told me. “On a sports team, before you do the match, do you take out the referee to dinner?” The #StillSanders community hailed Cortes as a hero for exposing voter fraud they had long suspected. However, Cortes later clarified to me that his data could never prove vote manipulation and asked to retract all of his quotes. In an echo chamber like Reddit, that kind of misinformation went unchallenged because it furthered Sanders’ cause.

Some pro-Sanders blogs have emerged specifically to fill the void caused by the mainstream progressive media increasingly shunning the Vermont senator. The Progressive Wing was born about a month ago when Kiowa Blade, who used to write a daily “Bernie News Roundup” for Daily Kos, left the site and took his traffic to a new standalone site. The Progressive Wing has raised more $86,000 for the Act Blue PAC, which allows anyone to fundraise on the Internet for Democratic Party candidates of their choosing, and another $50,000 for down-ballot Democrats through online donations. Unlike many of the remaining Sanders supporters who are active in online forums, Blade thinks party unity is achievable and warranted, so long as Clinton makes ample policy overtures to Sanders’ camp, like her recently updated college tuition policies. “Our goal is to further the ‘Political Revolution’ that Sanders started by highlighting progressive candidates, causes and issues,” Blade says. “[We] certainly look to incorporate that movement into the Democratic Party itself by ‘taking over’ from within.”

The profile of Caucus99Percent users is further left. Evolving from mailing lists, Google groups and primitive webpages, Caucus99Percent was started as a non-partisan progressive blog in January 2015 with a few hundred active community members. But the site grew suddenly to over 2,100 users following Daily Kos’ endorsement of Clinton in March, when “word got out that our site would allow people to advocate for Bernie,” says Joe Shikspack, a Maryland-based co-administrator of the site. Although the site does not endorse any candidate, its community is largely composed of Sanders supporters who do not affiliate with a party, including many who have been involved in the 2011 Occupy movement, anti-war protests and environmentalism efforts. “The two major parties monopolize the political space and present us with choices that are completely unacceptable in terms of creating the better world that we are looking for,” says Shikspack, who will join the ranks of Sanders progressives at the Philadelphia convention.

Shikspack’s skepticism, much like that of patrons of his site, is rooted in the belief that the Democratic primary was “rigged” in more ways than one. He says DNC chairman Wasserman Shultz “went out of her way to make the rules to favor Clinton”; that the primary debate schedule gave Clinton more exposure; that electronic voting systems have resulted in voter roll purges; and that the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint fundraising venture of Clinton’s presidential campaign, the DNC and 32 state party committees, is a giant “fundraising scam.” (Clinton’s campaign and the DNC have argued that all party politicians will benefit from this fundraising structure because it will enhance national voter data, research and communications.)

Once the convention is over and Clinton, presumably, becomes the official nominee, will Sanders’ hard-core online supporters finally follow the beloved Vermonter and vote to thwart presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump?

Debbie Lusigan—star of “The Sane Progressive,” a YouTube channel with more than 21,000 followers—has been exasperated in her near-daily vlogs by the prospect that Sanders would urge her to help elect Clinton. “You cannot tell the American people that we have to fight these big-moneyed interests,” she said in a July video, “but I’m going to go over here and endorse their chosen, installed operative.” Shikspack, for his part, will likely vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, as will a majority of the Caucus99Percent community. The rest may write-in Sanders on the ballot, if possible. Few say they will cross over to the enemy camp and vote for Clinton. Even fewer seem to plan to abstain from voting outright, which they see as a weak form of protest—none of Sanders’s supporters are passive, even if they may represent many factions of the left that are at times splintered among themselves.

Ultimately, the #StillSanders movement depends on the support of many factions, some of them still seething, and they will use that anger to further progressivism, they say. “We were created by and we exist because of policy failures that left people out of the prosperity of the United States,” Doug, the Kossacks_for_Sanders user in Portland, told me. “The floor fight is going to be about making the Democratic platform as progressive as we can.”