REMEMBER THE PUMAS?

Those were some of the disgruntled Hilary voters who were so upset that she wouldn't win the nomination that that decided "party unity my ass" and were threatening to sit out the general election or even vote for McCain. The website No Quarter is the clearest example I came across and I recall that on some of the discussion threads, it seemed that I was on Free Republic instead of a liberal blog.

I never understood why the PUMAs were so angry and now I might have come across an answer. Glenn Greenwald recently interviewed Jonathan Weiler about a book he co-authored, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. It turns out that a persons level of authoritarianism was predictive of who would support Hilary instead of Obama:

We're talking about an entirely Democrat electorate, or mostly Democrat electorate, some independents also, and so partisanship is itself not really at play there. And yet we found an incredibly powerful relationship between authoritarianism and whether you voted for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Specifically, the nonauthoritarians were very drawn to Obama, and authoritarians were very drawn to Hillary, especially after she started really playing up, directly or indirectly, her beer-drinking, white persona.