Many Democrats will not vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for president even if she is the nominee of the party.

This simple and inarguable fact is apparently a revelation for many mainstream media pundits and journalists, as is the notion that people of similar sentiment would lightly organize and rally around a Twitter hashtag like #BernieOrBust.

The establishment consternation over the very idea that Democratic Party members would refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton came into intense focus after an interview actress Susan Sarandon did with perpetually credulous MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes, wherein she explained that many supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders do not like or trust former Secretary Clinton and will likely not vote for her if she is the nominee.

The substance of Sarandon’s argument was completely coherent and sensible concerning the likelihood of left-leaning Democrats to support a candidate like Hillary Clinton, who has supported aggressive wars in Iraq and Libya while shilling for Corporate America and Wall Street at home. Sarandon even postulated that some of those people might be content to let Donald Trump become president in hopes that Trump would destroy the current system and allow a better one to be built in its place.

While that last point predictably led to smear pieces from the usual suspects in hack journalism, it was not long before the pundits really started condemning the idea that Democrats would not come home in November and vote for Clinton, should she be the nominee.

Any "Democrat" who is willing to put Trump in the WH for the sake of a "revolution" isn't a Democrat. The end.

— Goldie Taylor (@goldietaylor) March 29, 2016

That being a Democrat only requires filling out a form, and that the US political system was designed (or at least has been redesigned) to be a two-party system, is irrelevant to these pundits. Registering as a Democrat for them includes some strange unwritten agreement that you have to vote for party’s nominee, no matter how objectionable you find them.

Thankfully, this claim is unenforceable and leads one to more fully appreciate the virtues of a secret ballot voting system.

So there it stands. If the Democratic Party puts up former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as its nominee for president in 2016, many Democrats will not vote for her. Nor, for that matter, will a sizable portion of independents. According to public polling, Hillary Clinton’s unfavorable ratings only slightly exceed Donald Trump’s, which is probably why Senator Sanders does better against Donald Trump than Clinton does in a general election match up.

For the partisan pragmatists who are supporting Hillary Clinton because their overriding concern is keeping the White House in Democratic hands, it is clear which candidate should be dumped for the good of the party.