Team Bernie Isn’t Fazed by the Bros

Updated at 11:56 a.m. ET on January 31

AMES, IOWA—National news outlets have published a series of news articles and commentary recently devoted to the idea that Senator Bernie Sanders’s supporters are singularly cruel.

This week, The New York Times dedicated 3,000 words to the subject, delineating the threats and insults sent by Sanders’s “internet army” since 2016 to its opponents online. The Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin unfavorably compared his supporters to those of Donald Trump, remarking that Sanders’s is “the most divisive campaign in the primary.” A Daily Beast story warned that Sanders’s “toxic wedge of fandom … threatens to distract from his campaign and turn off potential supporters.”

Yet in the face of negative, instructs volunteers to tell any voters who ask that supporters’ “Bernie bro” reputation “is a media-driven perception.”