California’s Bernie holdouts are being even more ‘ridiculous’ than their counterparts from other states. Here’s why.

PHILADELPHIA — “Governor Brown! We challenge the votes!” a young Bernie Sanders superfan in a black T-shirt and dark glasses shouted at California Gov. Jerry Brown as he tried to announce the results of the June 7 California primary during Tuesday’s roll call here at the Democratic National Convention. “We challenge the votes!”

Hillary Clinton, of course, won both the California primary and the nomination. Sanders lost.

“Continuing to scream isn’t going to change anything,” someone in the scrum replied, pointing this out.

“We want the votes recounted!” the Bernie guy yelled.

“We heard you,” his critic said.

A chant of “Hillary! Hillary!” rippled through the delegation, drowning out any remaining dissent.

Sanders supporters have hardly stayed silent in Philadelphia. Rowdy pockets of Bernie or Bust die-hards spent yesterday afternoon loudly booing the mere mention of Clinton’s name.

But the California delegation has been the loudest, rowdiest, and, as Sarah Silverman would put it, most “ridiculous” of all. And the fact that dissent persisted until the roll call — it had already fizzled out pretty much everywhere else — only reinforced the perception that Sanders’ supporters in California are less interested in party unity than their peers in other states.

So why are these Californians determined to stir the pot?

At a group breakfast Monday morning, Sanders fans from the Golden State repeatedly interrupted a star-studded lineup of California pols as they tried to rally the delegation around Clinton.

They booed Rep. Michael M. Honda and Secretary of State Alex Padilla. They chanted, “Bernie, Bernie, Bernie!” during Rep. Barbara Lee’s address. (Lee is a progressive icon.) And when House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi tried to explain that “the differences that we have are not so great compared to the chasm between us and Republicans,” someone shoved a “Bernie” sign in her face.

“I don’t consider it a discourtesy,” Pelosi said. “Even if it is intended as one.”

Monday’s session at the Wells Fargo Center was much the same, with a vocal group of California delegates continuing to holler and howl well into primetime — long after the Bernie or Bust folks from other states had simmered down.

“Watching the wild-eyed hooting among the Golden State faithful was a startling departure even from the anti-Trump dissonance at last week’s Republican National Convention,” reported Reason’s Matt Welch. “These people are pissed and despondent in a way I’ve never seen on the floor of a major party convention.”

“I’m fed up with the Democratic Party,” Melissa Michelson of Alhambra told the Los Angeles Times. “It doesn’t talk to me, it doesn’t speak to me. There’s nothing they can say to make us feel better.”

Several related theories circulated Tuesday among experts and convention-goers.

For one thing, the California delegation is the convention’s largest, with more than 500 members. Sanders may not control a higher share of the delegation from California than from other states, but in terms of raw numbers, there are more Sanders supporters sitting together in the California section, stage right, than anywhere else in the arena.

“We’re the largest, so just by math, we would have the most people who are upset,” says Nathan Fletcher, a Clinton delegate from San Diego. “If Arkansas has one, then we have 100.”

More people equals more noise. When the crowd is feeding off of itself, a mob mentality can take hold.

“And that, in turn, means they can command a lot of attention,” adds Chris Lehane, a San Francisco-based veteran of the Clinton White House and Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign who now serves as head of global policy and public affairs for Airbnb.

Also playing a part: The discontent has been brewing among California left-wingers for some time.

“Jerry Brown, the Democratic governor here, has been pretty centrist,” says Dan Schnur, a former spokesman for Republicans Pete Wilson and John McCain who currently runs the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. “That leads to a lot of frustration among party activists. They wish he were more progressive.”

Making matters worse is the fact that with its robust ballot-initiative process, California is supposed to be a bastion of direct democracy. But it hasn’t really worked out that way — again, much to the left’s disappointment.

“It’s been a lot of years since the ballot-initiative process has been a reliable place to go for progressive policy measures,” Schnur said. “It takes a ton of money to pass one of these things. The process has gotten fairly corporatized.”

Take into account an electorate that likes to see itself as a leading indictor of where the rest of the country is heading on hot-button issues, from medical marijuana to climate change, and a Democratic base that expected to finally play a decisive role in a presidential primary battle this summer, and you have a recipe for revolt.

Sanders supporters were particularly invested in the idea that the California primary could change the course of the nominating contest — and particularly bitter when it didn’t. Some, like the Bernie guy pestering Brown for a recount, insisted (falsely) that the election was stolen — a “storyline that was much stronger in California than anywhere else,” according to Fletcher.

“So if you couldn’t play spoiler from a mathematical perspective in June,” says Lehane, “then you wait and play spoiler from an emotional perspective at the convention.”

And then there’s the final and perhaps most powerful factor to consider: time.

“Some other of these other states had their contentious, divisive primaries in, like, February,” says Fletcher. “So then they had March, April, May, June and July to get over it. We just had ours in June. It’s still raw.”

“When you look at how much that raw nerve was soothed yesterday, in one day, then there’s today and tomorrow and the next day — I think we’re well on our way to unity,” Fletcher continued. “I watched the Sanders holdouts go from 100 people to 10 people in a single day. It’s a part of what we do at a convention. It’s the final act of people coming together.”
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