Some people have rich fantasy lives

I was listening to the Michelangelo Signorile show on Sirius XM as I was coming home this afternoon. As might be expected, one of the topics du jour was politics and the California primary. Also as might expected, he was getting a few phone calls from folks who are seriously detached from reality.

There are a number of Bernie Sanders supporters who are quite vocal about their dislike of Hillary Clinton. They swear up and down there's no way they'll ever vote for her; they'll either sit out the election or vote for a third party candidate. I don't have much sympathy for the hard-core fanatics. I don't like Hillary much myself, but when it comes to voting for her or voting for someone who's sounding more and more like his kids would be trying to shuffle him off to a "memory care" unit if he wasn't (as he likes to remind us) really, really rich, I'll vote for the candidate who isn't showing signs of slipping into dementia. (And once again I'm bemused by the way you can say and do totally batshit crazy stuff and no one calls you on it if you're rich or already in a position of power, but that same behavior would result in shunning or getting tossed in a holding cell waiting for a pysch evaluation if you were poor.)

Anyway, those same "never Hillary" types do seem to be living in a fantasy world. One guy who called in was totally convinced that if Bernie Sanders would just throw his lot in with Green Party possible nominee Jill Stein the people would rise up and defeat both Hillary and the Donald. On what planet are these people living? Right now Jill Stein is polling about 5%. If she does indeed end up as the official Green Party nominee (they haven't had their convention yet so the nominee could turn out to be someone even less well-known), she might manage to pull off 1% of the vote in the general election. Studies of past elections indicate that about 80% of the people who support a third party candidate when responding to polls in the months leading up to the elections experience a reality check when the time comes to actually mark a ballot.