Internet organizer, newsletter writer and professional "dudebro" blocker Al Giordano is making moves to challenge Bernie Sanders for his senate seat in 2018.
As Joy-Ann Reid outlined in a Daily Beast profile on Monday, Giordano, who lives in Mexico and is registered to vote in New York (he claims roots in Vermont based on his past organizing work against nuclear power in the state), will try to stake out positions to Sanders's left on issues ranging from gun violence to racial profiling. He has even begun the necessary pandering to Vermont's dairied interests, so you know he's serious. However, as is also made clear in the profile, these issues are secondary to the real reason Giordano feels compelled to run against the most popular senator in the United States: One too many "dudebros" made fun of him online.
From Reid's profile:
So why would he do it? Because in Giordano's view, and that of his social media supporters, Bernie is losing ugly and hurting Democrats' chances of prevailing against Donald Trump in November.
"I mean, what haven't they touched?" Giordano asks, peering at me via a 6-by-4 inch Skype window from his home in Mexico City. "What part of the Obama coalition have they not alienated? It's like they want to erase the coalition."
Giordano is referring not to Sanders himself, but to his most fervent online followers, who have blasted away at everyone from John Lewis to Delores Huerta to Elizabeth Warren, and most recently Barney Frank, for failing to support Bernie's "political revolution," or worse, for backing Hillary Clinton, who is loathed by a swath of the Sanders faithful. Giordano says he blames Sanders for the vituperative tendencies of his shock troops, and for failing to talk them down.
Of course, there are sillier reasons for running for public office. Some people run because they're bored; others because they feel entitled. If Giordano feels that Sanders displayed a failure of leadership by not "training his troops," and is therefore unfit to represent his constituents, that's his prerogative. It's an odd prerogative, but it's his nonetheless. However, the Daily Beast profile includes at least one detail about Giordano that leaves me puzzled as to why he feels more fit to lead said constituents: Al Giordano is a habitual non-voter.
As Reid wrote,
The 56-year-old Giordano presents as a combative Hillary Clinton supporter, but he didn't vote absentee for her (or for anyone) in the April 19 primary in his home state of New York. He vocally backed and voted for Barack Obama in 2008, but has only voted for president one other time in 20 years: for Bill Clinton in 1996.
If a polling firm called Al Giordano to ask him who he was voting for in the 2018 Vermont primary against Bernie Sanders, Al Giordano would say he was voting for himself and the pollster would throw out his response because he doesn't vote often enough to be considered a likely voter. When voters ask Al Giordano why he's running, his go-to answer is that he had a bad online experience in an election cycle in which he didn't bother himself to vote -- despite making his preference clear from the confines of cyberspace. When Al Giordano asks voters for their support, he is asking them to participate in an election that he likely wouldn't -- even if he lived in the relevant state, which he doesn't.
Al Giordano regularly gets mad online when supporters for Bernie Sanders indicate that they might not vote in the general election this November, despite the fact that there is a less-than-even chance that Al Giordano will himself vote in the general election this November. Al Giordano mocks those who didn't vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary this year, despite having not voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary this year.
Giordano has explained this lack of turnout on his part by pointing to the fact that he's been living abroad -- voting absentee is tough, apparently -- and pivoting to Senate votes that Sanders has missed while running for president. To keep the comparison apples to apples, in what should otherwise go without saying, Sanders did at least bother to show up to vote for himself in the Vermont primary last March. I assume that Al Giordano will establish residency and register to vote in Vermont before he officially files to run for Sanders's seat, but as of right now he would be legally barred from doing the same -- even if he drummed up the willpower to fill out the paperwork.
Al Giordano is gearing up to ask Vermonters to do something that he almost never does: cast ballots. I imagine the voters of Vermont are poised to answer his request with a question: Why?