If it’s Paul Ryan or John Kasich, she’s toast.
You think anyone who cast a vote for Trump is going to vote for Ryan or Kasich? Your choices are nominate Trump and lose in a landslide because most people find him detestable or nominate anyone else and lose in a landslide because you lost all the Trump voters. I don’t see how there are any other options.
It’s ridiculous to assume the conservatives will merely attack Sanders over his politics. The main attack will be something personal out of nowhere. Sure it’ll be a lie but it’ll be a plausible enough lie to linger through the election. It’ll be the equivalent of Bill Clinton is a drug dealer, John McCain has an illegitimate black child, John Kerry was a war criminal, or Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
I’ve talked to Trump voters. They like Kasich. DIdn’t ask about Ryan because he didn’t seem likely at the time.
They might like Kasich or Ryan, but would they like them if Trump had a plurality of votes, but the nomination was given to Kasich or Ryan at the convention? Despite Kasich having so few votes and Ryan having none coming in? I’d think that Trump having the nomination “stolen” from him would upset a significant number of Trump voters, so that they’d be less likely to go vote.
Possibly, but Clinton faces the same problem with Sanders voters. She’s being awfully negative and dishonest and even going so far as to attack Sanders’ supporters. That’s not going to be very helpful when she wants to win them back.
Seth Abramson is an anti-Hillary blogger.
And even if you grant any of his argument, the Venn Diagram of what he claims Clinton is doing and what the Republican/Conservative attack on Sanders will be has no intersect. So it is irrelevant to the future.
I know Seth, so it’s kind of fun to see his name pop up everywhere this cycle.
As to the OP, I think you’re exactly right. Heck, even in a recent thread here I learned a couple of things about Sanders that made him go from “Happy to vote for him in the general” to “Hope I don’t have to vote for him in the general, but I still will if it comes to that.”
Right, the Democratic campaign has maybe been more negative than I’d like ideally, but not awful. Doesn’t seem any worse or different than other primary elections in other years. I’ve seen that statistic that 33% of Sanders supporters wouldn’t vote for Clinton, but I’ve also seen that it’s closer to 15% or something like that. I think that most Clinton or Sanders voters will vote for the Democratic candidate. They might not be happy, and they might be grumbling, but they’ll do it.
But as of now, there is literally no way for Kasich to win unless Trump didn’t win a majority of votes, and then the Kasich somehow swung the nomination. I would think a lot of Trump voters would be upset about that. Even if Trump doesn’t have a majority going in, he’d have a plurality. And there has been a lot of talk about how the GOP and major Republicans don’t want him to win. There are probably a lot of Trump supporters who like Kasich and would be happy to vote for him if he had been winning all along, but unhappy if it feels like he stole the nomination. There are a few Sanders supporters who might feel that Clinton is stealing the election, but I think most see that Clinton just has more resources and more support.
I think what might be more annoying is how petulant Clinton is becoming, despite the fact that she did the same thing to Obama in 2008. Except Sanders has been far gentler to her than Clinton was to Obama.
The only Bernie supporters she’ll lose are the ones who weren’t going to vote for her even if he wasn’t running. There are precious few of his supporters who will vote for any Republican, and most of those would go to Trump and probably weren’t that reliable for him anyway.
Also, the GOP doesnt need to gear up it’s hate & lies machine right now, as the Sanderistas are doing it for them.
This.
What did you learn, out of curiosity?
Yes. (As I was reading the posts above this one and seeing (several times) things along the lines of ‘what can the GOP do to him, anyway? it’s not like it’s a secret that he’s a socialist’, I was composing in my head a post pretty much like yours.)
The GOP will certainly use a wide range of attacks; Sanders’ political views will be the least of it. And there is plenty of fodder for them. Just today, for example, NPR (!) ran a story reminding us that while Hillary Clinton has released eight years of her tax returns, Bernie Sanders has yet to release his. A Raw Story article begins:
The “hypocrisy” attack ads basically write themselves.
(That NPR story may not be available online until tomorrow, but here’s a story about Clinton’s tax returns: Hillary Clinton Releases 8 Years Of Tax Returns : It's All Politics : NPR
Yeah, and the anti-Clinton stuff coming from that camp is as ugly and vitriolic as anything the Karl Roves of the world could come up with. Just personally vicious. So much of it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with policy issues.
That’s some article excerpt **adaher **posted upstairs. So many things wrong with it I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
Completely agree with the OP and related comments.
In addition to the things already said regarding polling (most notably that Sanders has experienced very little thus far in the way of attacks, and if he is the nominee he will, he will)…
Hypothetical matchups are interesting, though not all that meaningful; but we actually do have some information from the primaries and caucuses about which states Sanders or Clinton might win. (And of course it is the states that count, not national sentiment.)
There are 5 states that have voted for the winner in the last four presidential elections: Nevada, Colorado, Florida, Ohio, and Virginia. Those are the swingiest of the swing states. All of these states have voted, and Clinton won four: Nevada by a small amount, Ohio by a solid margin, Florida and Virginia by 30+ points. Sanders won one of these five states, Colorado, by a healthy amount.
Whoever wants to win the 2016 general election is going to have to do well in these five states. The best evidence we have says that Clinton is considerably more popular in them than Sanders. I’m not saying Sanders is doomed to lose FL or VA, but I *am *saying that Clinton probably has a better shot of winning in these key states than Sanders does. Certainly that’s suggested by the data we actually have.
Great point, Ulf.
Further evidence that Sanders would wilt under greater media scrutiny:
This is the equivalent of a pit thread for people who prefer passive aggressive insults. You constructed a hypothetical Sanders supporter pinata so you could bash it with your imaginary stick of self righteous superior judgement.
How convenient it is to ignore or handwave away valid critiques in favor of bashing a make believe opponent. No names? Okay. Here’s one from another Sanders supporter in another thread. So far, the only reply is a semantic nit pick:
You see any invalid criticism there? See, the GOP can’t attack her on these things because they are also guilty. And that’s a-okay with you guys, right?
Believe me, I have been where you are now re Clinton. I campaigned for WJC in the 90’s. Voted for HRC in the NY Senate race like a good little Democrat. I had my doubts about them, but after those long hard years of Reagan and Bush, I was willing to accept the progressive shortcomings in order to get a Democrat back in the WH and senate. I hoped they would pivot left after winning. And there was a time when WJC could have done so. But he didn’t. He squandered that opportunity and instead we got deregulation, and welfare reform, and DOMA, and don’t ask don’t tell, and botched health care reform, etc. And with Senator HRC we got an Iraq war vote.
And through it all, I had to reflexively defend them, because after all, they were my people, they were Democrats. Even the unnecessarily stupid and low class bullshit had to be rationalized or handwaved, just like I see happening now from Clinton supporters. This is what the Clintons do to their supporters - they turn them into fools and patsies.
I paid my dues with them and I am done. Their bullshit is on you guys now. You better pace yourselves, because I doubt it’s going to change now. I’ll be very happy to be wrong about that, but I have no illusions…
Which candidate does better in a primary says almost nothing about which candidate would do better in the general election, because they are two different electorates.
I didn’t much want Clinton, myself. But she’s the only one running who will win.
Win the nomination as well as the election. Sanders won’t. He never could. He isn’t now and his future is even worse.
Is winning all that matters? This year? Hell, yeah.
There are no other arguments.
If you want a progressive moment, start it from the bottom up. Don’t try top down. If a progressive doesn’t get the nomination you know whose fault it is? Progressives. No one else has any blame.