Most Sanders supporters care about policy. Most HRC supporters just like her for "who she is."
This is what I've noticed over the past several months. The vast majority of Sanders supporters whom I've encountered care about Sanders because of his policy substance and consistent track record. They want single-payer healthcare, tuition-free college, strong unions, a living wage, Glass-Steagall to break up the Wall Street banks, opposing the TPP, pay equity for women workers, a financial transactions tax, a carbon tax, investment in rebuilding our infrastructure, making billionaires and large corporations pay their fair share in taxes, more progressive taxation, worker-cooperatives, and overturning Citizens United and having the public financing of elections.
They care about income and wealth inequality, low social mobility, inequality of opportunity, and the corrosive influence of money in politics. They don't want endless war, and care about protecting our civil liberties. They want to stop private prisons, end mass incarceration, and effect racial justice. They want to end the death penalty. They want to stop the War on Drugs. They care about giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of Bernie supporters really like him as a person, but that's not the primary reason why they are supporting him. Bernie always stays on point, always talks about the issues, and avoids engaging in personal attacks, or engaging in personality politics. He doesn't make it about him. He makes it about all of us, and always says that he can't do it alone, and he needs a strong grassroots movement to retake our government from Wall Street, big business, and the billionaire class. Most people don't know a lot about his personal life or history, and most people don't care. That's not why they are supporting him.
If Elizabeth Warren got in the race instead of Bernie, I'm sure most people who support Bernie now would have backed Elizabeth Warren, and enthusiastically so. There's no "special" love for Bernie based on "who he is." It's all about what he stands for, and what his policy substance is. There just lacks this really strong personal and emotional attachment to the guy personally. Just, after Elizabeth Warren repeatedly declined running, and Bernie jumped in, people who were progressives and wanted to hear a strong progressive talk about the actual issues found a candidate in Bernie. There was no strong, broad based constituency for Bernie before he jumped in, while there was for Hillary, because people just like her as a person.
Bernie doesn't screw around, or talk about frivolous stuff. He doesn't have take for people to talk about his hair, or engage in personal attacks. He doesn't want to make it about him. Bernie Sanders generally don't care that much about his wife, children, family life, his image, his dancing, his singing, or his general persona. In fact, even when he does look disheveled, we don't care, because it's what's beneath the surface that counts.
However, most Hillary supporters I know don't care about policy as much. They don't talk about the issues in the same way that Bernie's supporters do. They praise Hillary Clinton because of who she is, her image, and because they simply just like her a lot personally. They want to see a female president. They feel that she's a symbol for the success of women, and that electing her will break down glass ceilings. They think she's an "inspiration" to them. While all of that is great and important (and I'd have loved to have supported Elizabeth Warren for POTUS if she ran), it's surprising how little policy discussion goes on among Hillary supporters. They talk about how "cute" her grand-child is, about her dancing with Ellen, about how Ellen Degeneres praised and supporter her, and so forth. Not a lot of substance beneath the surface. They praise her for being so qualified and hard-working, how she got a degree from Yale Law School, how she was First Lady, a Senator, and Secretary of State, and so forth.
I don't hear people talking about Keystone XL Pipeline, Citizens United, universal healthcare, the death penalty, institutional racism, for-profit prisons, breaking up the big banks, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, etc., the Iraq War, drone strikes, fracking, and Israel when talking about Hillary. Whether Hillary is a "moderate" as she recently claimed, or a progressive as she claimed before, they don't really care. They just admire Hillary's image and her persona, and don't talk about specific policy as much. They have a strong emotional attachment to her, and people know her because she's famous, and just like her image, so they'll support Hillary regardless of whatever positions she holds. Doesn't matter that she's far more hawkish and militarist than most Congressional Democrats (Vox had a great article about this: http://www.vox.com/2015/4/13/8395917/hillary-clinton-hawk).
On the campaign trail so far, Hillary's also been vague on policy, punting on a variety of issues (Glass-Steagall, Keystone XL Pipeline, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and minimum wage- she won't say if she supports $15 national wage like Sanders and O'Malley). She's given a few policy speeches, but none of them were nearly as detailed as those given by Bernie Sanders or Martin O'Malley so far. Bernie and O'Malley constantly talk about policy, whereas Hillary's been laying low, doing cute, trivial, substance-free events where she focuses on increasing her personal appeal to people.
For the people who are aware of both HRC and Bernie, but pick HRC anyway, I rarely hear them talk about why HRC is superior to Bernie on policy alone. Almost always, it goes back to personality politics, about how she'll be the first woman POTUS, how she's experienced, etc. It's just a general observation that I've seen.
= new reply since forum marked as read
and I am an advocate, by profession, as a matter of fact. Glad you noticed! 
A refreshing difference! 
It's more than that.
In Brief
A great majority of people neither adhere to a full, complete set of beliefs which produces a clear ideology nor do they have a clear grasp of what ideology is. This is measured by a lack of coherence in responses to open-ended questions. Ideology of elites is not mirrored by the masses and voter revolt to a political party does not reflect ideological shifts.
Converse analyzes open-ended interview questions to measure conceptualization of ideology. He concludes that the liberal-conservative continuum is a high level abstraction not typically used by the man in the street because of response instability and lack of connections made between answers. There is no underlying belief structure for most people, just a bunch of random opinions. Even on highly controversial, well-publicized issues, large portions of the electorate do not have coherent opinions. In fact, many simply answer survey questions as though they are flipping a coin.
Though some political sophisticates do structure their opinions in a larger ideological framework, such structure is rare. This level of political sophistication (one's "level of conceptualization"
is correlated positively with the respondent's level of education, degree of political involvement, and amount of political information.
Key points: Most people do not have strong belief systems; that is, they do not think ideologically. A minority of people have fixed preferences and answer survey questions consistently, but most simply give random answers. Most people do not interpret politics through an ideological lens.
You need to make a distinction between what is part of the party platform for voters and what we know from political science. Of course it's not desirable to tell voters that they are ignorant and make vote choices on an irrational basis, but we know empirically that this is true, at least for many voters, enough to provide the margin of victory in many elections.
It would be great if voters behaved according to the prescriptions of normative democratic theory, but that's not what we have seen. It's lamentable that more people don't know this: political science, as a discipline, has not been very good at disseminating what it has learned to the public, even to the most knowledgeable folks who might be interested. The article OnyxCollie cites is an old one, dating to 1964, but it's remarkable the extent to which Converse's findings have formed the basis for subsequent research, and how his central findings have largely been confirmed: this is all the more remarkable given the extent to which there are many political scientists from diverse schools of thought who seem to desperately want this to be falsified. You can quibble over the numbers, but what Converse found has been very robust:
1. It is possible to create an ordinal ranking of the public by assessing their level of political knowledge.
2. There are some people at the top of the scale who seem to exhibit a consistent and ideological set of political behaviors. These ideological voters are fairly few in number.
3. There are a much larger number of people who are essentially "low-information voters," who know less about politics, and behave in ways that seem to be fairly random. This group is much larger than the former group.
For many people, this is a depressing finding. It should be noted, BTW, that while Converse does see the level of political information as correlated with education, he does not claim that it is determined by it: in fact, he specifically rejects the conclusion that his findings are the result of some ignorant "lumpenproletariat" that is incapable of knowing its own self interest or acting in ways that are consistent with what it believes.
How do you know that what you're talking about is accurate?
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/confident-idiots-92793/
The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance.
In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.
This isn’t just an armchair theory. A whole battery of studies conducted by myself and others have confirmed that people who don’t know much about a given set of cognitive, technical, or social skills tend to grossly overestimate their prowess and performance, whether it’s grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm care and safety, debating, or financial knowledge. College students who hand in exams that will earn them Ds and Fs tend to think their efforts will be worthy of far higher grades; low-performing chess players, bridge players, and medical students, and elderly people applying for a renewed driver’s license, similarly overestimate their competence by a long shot.
and then you made me chuckle.
But I especially appreciate the reference to concern trolls changing their minds because of mean Sanders supporters. Such dishonest, manipulative emotional blackmail. 
provided that candidate has a consistent, multi-decade track record, and hits the major issues I care about.
I'm not looking for a Wife or a BFF.... or even a House Guest.
I don't care if they are male or female...ugly or good looking, cheat on their spouses, fat or slim, or smell bad.
I'm looking for a top notch manager with the right positions concerning race, transfer of wealth TO the already rich, Too-big-to-Fail, foreign Wars, the bloated Military Budget, the Environment, Persecution of Whistle Blowers, CU, BB voting, NSA & Un-Patriot Act, the Free Trade Scam, and the destruction of the Working/Middle Class.
In fact, I would vote for someone I dislike...IF he/she is on the right side of the above issues.
I strongly dislike LBJ, but wish he were President today.
[font size=3]A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus![/font]
-Rev Martin Luther King Jr.
[font color=firebrick size=3][center]"If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for,
at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them."
--- Paul Wellstone[/font][/center]
[center]
[/font]
[font size=1]photo by bvar22
Shortly before Sen Wellstone was killed[/center][/font]
You must be new to this exposing yourself thing...it's the element of surprise! 
Really surprised to see this thread rated up so much, since it says (in essence) Clinton has what it takes to win the general by a landslide.
Go DU!
Bought the whole thing.
I got better! This means I have difficulty excusing others who cling to the old ways... I'm a bit acerbic with them these days...
My mother still wants Thatcher back.
I'd get through an entire silo of popcorn!!!
Supreme Court being number one concern. 
Or should I have to prove you are? 
of a Bernie/Elizabeth (or Elizabeth/Bernie) ticket I think most progressives will be fine with it.
