Bernie Sanders has been on the rise in South Carolina -- among Republican voters.

Huh?

With the Democratic Party's primary in the Palmetto State set for the last day of the month, and with Republicans having cleared the way for the renomination of President Donald Trump, some South Carolina Republicans have hatched a plan to vote with the Democrats, and to cast their ballots for the septuagenarian socialist senator from Vermont. Why? Because they believe he'll be the easiest for Trump to beat come November.

And there you have it. Folks hoping above all else to see Trump defeated need to get this news out to those in the army of young Sanders supporters -- if they can get them to stop shouting long enough to hear, and consider, a reasoned argument.

Sanders and his backers have repeatedly asserted that if he's the Democratic Party's nominee, some heretofore legion of hidden voters will rise up, from the shadows, and hasten to the polls to send Trump packing. A realist's response to that notion: Yeah, right. In your dreams, kids.

Sanders finished in the Iowa caucuses in a virtual tie with Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and just barely eked out a victory over the young and largely inexperienced onetime small city executive in the New Hampshire primary a week later. And in neither contest was turnout anything to write home about.

Those who'd like to beat Trump would do well to look elsewhere. Because the so-called Bernie brothers are telling themselves a fantastical tale.

The long and the short of it is this: If Democrats nominate a pragmatist, a moderate, someone left of center but reasonable, the election will, in many ways, be a referendum on Trump. And that's a race that the right Democrat can win. But if they nominate Sanders, the election will be turned into a referendum on socialism. There are already videos of a shirtless Sanders singing "This Land is Your Land" with his comrades in Moscow, and of Sanders and his wife, Jane, praising the Soviet system.

And that is merely a hint of what would be ahead if Sanders were the nominee.

Republicans are going to tell an endless string of lies about the Democratic nominee, no matter who it is. Democrats shouldn’t hand them a big pile of nasty truths to tell, too.