# Bernie Sanders makes it official. How far will he go in 2020? **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [February 19, 2019, 1:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821 "2019-02-19T13:11:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Thing\_Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecb155/32.png) [@Thing\_Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing_Fish)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/121 "2019-02-21T03:55:10Z")
> [@Lance\_Turbo](#): > > [Emerson poll](http://emersonpolling.com/2019/02/16/majority-of-americans-disagree-with-trumps-national-emergency-despite-a-plurality-agreeing-with-border-wall-extension/) from this week… > > General Election: Trump vs. Biden Emerson Biden 55, Trump 45 Biden +10 > General Election: Trump vs. O’Rourke Emerson O’Rourke 53, Trump 47 O’Rourke +6 > General Election: Trump vs. Warren Emerson Warren 53, Trump 47 Warren +6 > General Election: Trump vs. Brown Emerson Brown 52, Trump 48 Brown +4 > General Election: Trump vs. Harris Emerson Harris 52, Trump 48 Harris +4 > General Election: Trump vs. Booker Emerson Booker 51, Trump 49 Booker +2 > General Election: Trump vs. Klobuchar Emerson Klobuchar 51, Trump 49 Klobuchar +2 > General Election: Trump vs. Sanders Emerson Sanders 51, Trump 49 Sanders +2 > > I’ll note that these numbers seem off to me in that there are no undecideds which is crazy this far out. An excellent point. The numbers in this poll are generally quite different than other polls I have seen. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/122 "2019-02-21T03:58:24Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > 1. Most voters have not been taught that Sanders hates Israel, and views terrorists like Hamas as allies. Does he really? Do you have a cite for that? The only articles I’ve seen on the subject are along the lines of: “Bernie employed person A. Person A once gave a speech to organization B. Organization B once employed person C. And person C once praised Hamas.” Whatever you feel about Bernie, I don’t think it’s true that he views Islamic terrorists as allies. (Unlike, say, Jeremy Corbyn.) ---
**Author:** ![Thing\_Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecb155/32.png) [@Thing\_Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing_Fish)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/123 "2019-02-21T04:05:58Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > Do you have a reason to think either means anything at all? They mean little at this point. My personal interpretation of the data is that the candidates who are hypothetically beating Trump by smaller margins right now are doing so because voters are less familiar with them, not because Biden and Sanders are intrinsically better candidates. But the question was whether I think Sanders can beat Trump. All available evidence suggests that he can. Given the choice between trusting polling data and trusting some dude on a message board sputtering “But his Soviet honeymoon! And his wife was once accused of improper accounting techniques! Once the voters hear of this, he is doomed! Doomed, I say!”, I’m gonna go with the data. ---
**Author:** ![Thing\_Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecb155/32.png) [@Thing\_Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing_Fish)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 4:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/124 "2019-02-21T04:14:37Z")
Does anyone have a link to a relatively unbiased discussion of the tax return issue? Because I have to be honest, that does bug me. ---
**Author:** ![Thing\_Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecb155/32.png) [@Thing\_Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing_Fish)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/125 "2019-02-21T04:24:16Z")
> [@Ulf\_the\_Unwashed](#): > > I really wish people would stop saying this. The two situations are not remotely comparable. > > In the 2008 primaries, Clinton lost the popular vote by about 100,000 ballots (that’s if you don’t count MI and FL, as you shouldn’t). The candidates were less than a percentage point apart. In mid-March she was behind by about 150 pledged delegates; that was her low-water mark, and by the end of the season she had brought the deficit down to about 100. > > In the 2016 primaries, Sanders lost the popular vote by about 3,700,000 ballots, or a deficit 37 times bigger than the Clinton deficit eight years earlier. The candidates were about 13 percentage points apart. Sanders ended the season with losses in California and New Jersey, leaving him 450 pledged delegates short. See any differences here? > > That’s before we get to superdelegates. Obama had a few more than Clinton by the end of the 2008 primaries. Clinton had about 12 times as many as Sanders by the end of the race in 2016. > > And that’s before we get to when the two candidates admitted defeat. Clinton conceded about four days after the last primary contest in '08. Sanders conceded about six weeks after the last primary contest in '16. > > Yes, because of proportional awarding of delegates Clinton reached a point toward the end in 2008 where it was very unlikely that she would be able to overcome Obama’s lead, and as an Obama supporter I said then and maintain now that she stayed in far too long. But her chances of pulling it out were light years beyond Sanders’s chances in 2016. By mid-April 2016 it was clear that Sanders had no shot, and yet, like Marvin K. Mooney, he refused to go now–or at any time till the votes were in at the convention. > > It’s ludicrous to think these situations are at all similar. I’ll grant your basic point that the situations are grossly dissimilar, and I agree that Sanders should have withdrawn before he did. Still…IIRC, the polls in California were basically accurate and predicted him losing there by 7-8 points, which he did. His biggest overperformance relative to polls was in Michigan, which he narrowly won after polls showed him losing by 15. So if he had duplicated that in California, he would have won by 7-8 points instead. And he would have been able to make the case to the superdelegates that he clearly had momentum on his side. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 7:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/126 "2019-02-21T07:33:26Z")
Bernie taking it via superdelegates after being on his high horse about them all through the primaries would have been rank hypocrisy. > [@Dale\_Sams](#): > > I’m gonna pull some strings with God and get him the nomination…and when leftists here and in the media continue to attack him, I want apologies. > > And when he beats Trump, I want more apologies from the people who say he has and had no chance Bernie would have a good chance to beat Trump. Virtually any Democrat with a pulse would. But that’s because Trump is so weak. Bernie as nominee would, IMO, give Trump a non-insignificant chance of winning, whereas a safer nominee would virtually eliminate that chance. Still, this is the best chance the far left is going to get to actually put one of their own in the White House, so I can’t blame them for licking their chops. I’m going to try my hardest to stop them though. And then if they prevail in the primaries, I’m going to take a deep breath, swallow hard, and do my best to oust Trump from office. > [@Thing\_Fish](#): > > Does anyone have a link to a relatively unbiased discussion of the tax return issue? Because I have to be honest, that does bug me. It bothers me too. A lot. To join Trump as the only two candidates since Nixon to refuse to release them is just straight up shady. I have to really wonder, since he pulled the same shit Trump did by stalling and making excuses but still acting like he was going to do it, when apparently he never intended to. So not only is it just a very questionable thing ethically that makes me wonder what he is hiding, it takes away an arrow from his quiver that any other Democrat would have. Another arrow any other Democrat but Bernie and Tulsi would have is to have no taint of involvement with the Soviet regime, in contrast to Trump. We are fools if we throw away those two aces in the hole (to mix metaphors a bit). ---
**Author:** ![Lamoral](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lamoral/32/16078_2.png) [@Lamoral](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamoral)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 7:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/127 "2019-02-21T07:47:52Z")
It might not sit well with you personally, but I firmly believe that the vast majority of voters do not give a shit about the candidate’s taxes. Taxes are like cancer. You’ll do anything to avoid them; you don’t even want to think about them; just the WORD is psychologically toxic. People prefer to keep it out of sight and out of mind whenever possible. Whatever “arrows” might theoretically be lacking from Sanders’ “quiver” are more than made up for by the strength of his message and his total conviction and purposefulness, something that very few American politicians can really claim to have at the present time. I say this as someone highly skeptical of the feasibility of his ideas. I’m just talking about Bernie The Candidate here. He has strong marketability. He’s successfully created a brand. He’s already achieved what most of the candidates will need to spend the entire next two years busting their asses on. In the marketplace of politics, Sanders is a hot commodity and highly competitive. How’s that for Communism? ---
**Author:** ![Heffalump\_and\_Roo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heffalump_and_roo/32/7691_2.png) [@Heffalump\_and\_Roo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heffalump_and_Roo)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 7:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/128 "2019-02-21T07:52:26Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > Things to mind: I passed this by without thinking about it, but since I was searching for the tax return issue, I did a 10 minute search on this as well. > [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > 1. Many voters know very little about Sanders and only know him as an anti-Hillary foil. It’s difficult to know what other people know, but information can be found on a 10 minute search. > [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > 1. Most voters have not been taught he is atheist. He has said he doesn’t belong to a religious organization, but he is religious. The polls showed people not very interested. > [@](#): > > Is Bernie Sanders religious or not? > Many Americans answer that question with a shrug, according to a January poll conducted by the Pew Research Center. Nearly a third say Sanders is “somewhat” religious; nearly a third say he’s not, and more than a quarter say they don’t know. [CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2016/04/14/politics/bernie-sanders-religion/index.html) > [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > 1. Most voters have not been taught he loved the Soviet Union. Well, he loved the experience of his honeymoon in the Soviet Union anyway. > [@](#): > > Q. Let’s move on to a lighter topic. You’ve been married to your wife Jane for almost 30 years. What’s the secret to a successful marriage? > > A. One word: romance. For example, on our honeymoon, I took Jane to Russia, back when it was still known as the Soviet Union. Russia was an incredible place back then, before the billionaires ruined everything. Who needs 30 different types of deodorant anyway? In the glory days of the Soviet Union, there was one brand, it was called “Deodorant,” and you had to wait four hours in line for it. By the time you got your hands on one, you were sweating so badly, not even the greediest billionaire’s fanciest deodorant could mask the stench. Or as I call it: The sweet smell of equality! [The Haven on Medium.com](https://medium.com/the-haven/bernie-sanders-reminisces-about-honeymoon-in-soviet-union-bcbe3537e06c) > [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > 1. Most voters have not been taught he has never worked a real job and spent much of his life on welfare. Snopes says it depends on what people mean by a 9-5 job (or “real job” as you say here). He’s been on a law task force, a freelance writer and a carpenter to name a few things before he became a mayor at age 39. At that time, it might not have been a “real job”, but today that might be considered a gig worker. Perhaps that’s why he has empathy for people who are struggling to make ends meet. He was on unemployment, but there were no documents about welfare that snopes listed. > [@](#): > > He’s on unemployment compensation right now, having worked for the Bread & Law Task Force, as a free-lance writer, and as a carpenter in the Burlington area [Snopes](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bernie-sanders-loser-meme/) > [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > 1. Most workers haven’t seen the 2016 RNC hit file on Sanders, which purportedly is full of nasty stories and is 2 feet thick. Expect a barrage of leaks about shady communist associations, and behaviors and opinions shared that are wildly out of the American mainstream. No doubt. Some of it may even be true. > [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > 1. Most voters have not been taught that Sanders hates Israel, and views terrorists like Hamas as allies. > [@](#): > > The Jewish presidential hopeful, a former kibbutz volunteer, is against the US ‘pouring so much military aid into Israel,’ vows to be ‘evenhanded’ in dealing with Israeli-Palestinian conflict [The Times of Israel](https://www.timesofisrael.com/where-does-bernie-sanders-stand-on-israel-2/) > [@Thing\_Fish](#): > > Does anyone have a link to a relatively unbiased discussion of the tax return issue? Because I have to be honest, that does bug me. Not sure if this is unbiased. Just some stuff I picked up in a quick search. As for the tax returns, Sanders’ income came mainly from his salary as a Senator and Social Security in 2014. His net worth, by some accounts, was $300,000, making him the poorest Senator at that time. > [@](#): > > Sanders’ tax return: As ‘boring’ as promised > > Most of his earnings came from his $174,000 salary as a U.S. senator, as well as Social Security benefits. [Politico](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/bernie-sanders-tax-return-222041) [Reddit discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/4d4qjj/sanders_tax_returns/) at that time, linking to tax returns. There seemed to be some kind of controversy at the time, but I don’t know what it was. From April 2015, > [@](#): > > Sanders said that he would release his full 2014 tax return on Friday, and he kept his word despite a long trip to the Vatican. You can see his full tax return at this link. > > Sanders warned at the debate that because he doesn’t make much money, the tax returns are going to be very boring. This was confirmed. His income for the entire year was less than Hillary Clinton has made for one speech at certain venues [Heavy.com](https://heavy.com/news/2016/04/bernie-sanders-tax-return-taxes-2014-released-net-worth-hillary-clinton-democratic-debate-refund-salary-donations/) ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 7:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/129 "2019-02-21T07:54:17Z")
> [@Deeg](#): > > Sanders is anti-GMO and anti-nuclear power, which means he is anti-science. He needs to go away. Bernie is pro-vaccination and anti-fracking, which means he’s pro-science. Why are you demanding that the heavily populated Northeast hew to nuclear power in a post-Fukushima world? And why is it so important that _no one even know_ if they’re eating GMO’s? What are you afraid of? ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 8:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/130 "2019-02-21T08:03:20Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > I am one person but it’s not crazy to think of me as being somewhat representative of people like me—people that voted Republican our entire lives but got on the never trump train. If it doesn’t worry you Sanders is the one way to make me a Trump supporter, it should. It does worry me that you would support a would-be dictator who wants to kill journalists, over someone whose worst sin is probably his hatred of nuclear power plants. But Bernie has the movement; Right now, it looks like he’ll get the Richard Ojeda types, he’ll get young people, he’ll even get some of the communists who don’t believe in electoral politics. And the Democrats need a movement like that to win. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 8:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/131 "2019-02-21T08:08:21Z")
Wait, what am I saying? The Democrats can beat Trump with an expired can of peaches. This year. Probably. The trick is hanging on after that. You must win\* future congressional elections. \*Democrats don’t do that, not since 1994. Seriously, though; against a divided field, if he stays healthy, Bernie is most likely going to do to the Democratic field what Trump did to the Republicans in 2016. It doesn’t matter what we think. Now the problem is getting him a good running mate in case he has a stroke in office. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 8:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/132 "2019-02-21T08:11:27Z")
RE: Israel - I think we should put a pin in the subject until the elections here next month. For the past decade, attitudes towards Israel, in American and elsewhere, have been conflated with attitudes toward Bibi Netanyahu and the Likud. If (God willing!) they lose the election, the entire array of support for and opposition to Israel will be rearranged - at which point we’ll see where each candidate (Dem and Rep) stands. ---
**Author:** ![Thing\_Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecb155/32.png) [@Thing\_Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing_Fish)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 8:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/133 "2019-02-21T08:11:45Z")
OK, so he did release the 2014 return and it was predictably unexciting. Why hasn’t he released more? Is it actually customary for candidates to release all their tax forms during the primaries, or do they usually wait until they’ve been nominated? ---
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 12:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/134 "2019-02-21T12:15:32Z")
> [@bobot](#): > > And tell “him” to fuck “himself”. Upon review, that came across way angrier than I intended. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/135 "2019-02-21T13:12:50Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > RE: Israel - I think we should put a pin in the subject until the elections here next month. For the past decade, attitudes towards Israel, in American and elsewhere, have been conflated with attitudes toward Bibi Netanyahu and the Likud. If (God willing!) they lose the election, the entire array of support for and opposition to Israel will be rearranged - at which point we’ll see where each candidate (Dem and Rep) stands. I think there’s a lot of truth to this, but even if Bibi loses, his opposition is under perpetual pressure not to look weak. I’m not sure how much would really change. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 1:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/136 "2019-02-21T13:15:05Z")
> [@Lamoral](#): > > It might not sit well with you personally, but I firmly believe that the vast majority of voters do not give a shit about the candidate’s taxes. Taxes are like cancer. You’ll do anything to avoid them; you don’t even want to think about them; just the WORD is psychologically toxic. People prefer to keep it out of sight and out of mind whenever possible. > > Whatever “arrows” might theoretically be lacking from Sanders’ “quiver” are more than made up for by the strength of his message and his total conviction and purposefulness, something that very few American politicians can really claim to have at the present time. > > I say this as someone highly skeptical of the feasibility of his ideas. I’m just talking about Bernie The Candidate here. He has strong marketability. He’s successfully created a brand. He’s already achieved what most of the candidates will need to spend the entire next two years busting their asses on. In the marketplace of politics, Sanders is a hot commodity and highly competitive. How’s that for Communism? I think taxes are not necessarily a deal breaker, but they’re an issue for sure, and I think they’re even more of an issue among democrats. Releasing tax returns are a gesture of transparency, which is something that Republican oligarchs obviously don’t value, but Democrats do. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 1:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/137 "2019-02-21T13:26:59Z")
> [@Thing\_Fish](#): > > Does anyone have a link to a relatively unbiased discussion of the tax return issue? Because I have to be honest, that does bug me. If you Google it, you’ll find a variety of articles on the matter. Politifact, in fact, reported in 2016 that the Sanders’ campaign assertion that they had released their tax returns was, in fact, “false”. > **[Bernie Sanders has released few tax returns compared with past and present...](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/apr/06/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-has-released-few-tax-returns-compar/)** > > Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders took some heat from CNN’s Jake Tapper during an April 3 interview. The Washington Post then followed it up with a fact check of their own, which can be read here: > **[Bernie Sanders’s false claim that he has released his full federal tax returns](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/04/05/bernie-sanderss-false-claim-that-he-has-released-his-full-federal-tax-returns/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3f32055d903e)** > > Plainly put, Sanders has not released any full federal tax return -- and earns Four Pinocchios. This was in response to an interview with Jake Tapper in which he said that he and his wife do his tax returns and excused himself by saying “We’ve been a little busy lately”. Taxes are an even bigger issue if he’s going to bring his wife into the discussion given that she was the subject of a federal probe into the collapse of the college she managed. Further, I’m wondering how smart it is for a high-profile political figure like Sanders to be doing his own taxes, especially since he’s that busy. I’m not claiming he doesn’t have the right to do them himself - he absolutely does. But how smart is that, really? Especially knowing that an error or two can lead to political scrutiny and even more so if you don’t have a third party to blame. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 1:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/138 "2019-02-21T13:43:42Z")
> [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](#): > > So just like Hillary Clinton in 2008. Except for the nomination being decided part. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/139 "2019-02-21T13:55:52Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > Simple facts—Trump didn’t win because of his base, who by and large were people who have always voted GOP. He won because Hillary’s personal unfavorability and bad campaigning allowed enough moderates and swing vote independents to find a way to “yes.” … A horse that has been beaten to death, reanimated, and beaten zombie horse killed again, many times, but not really so much so. There of course were moderates and swing voters who had voted for Obama who switched and said yes to Trump, partially offset by those who had gone Romney and switched and said yes to Clinton. But Trump did not win by getting more votes. I’m not talking here about the popular vote loss; he won with [fewer votes than Romney and McCain _lost_ with](https://mic.com/articles/159032/how-donald-trump-won-fewer-votes-than-romney-or-mc-cain-but-still-won-the-election#.mxk15NoQ5). He won because of [the missing Obama millions](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/obama-trump-voters-democrats.html). The argument that one needs to excite those who came out for Obama but sat it out for someone who was not seen as a change agent but as a return to the past, has more credence than being fearful of someone who is perceived as that change agent driving voters away. I think Sanders could win. I am not as sure of it as I am of other options winning and I am not on his train, but he could and his preaching that it is time for something completely different is not his weakness, it is his strength. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2019, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821/140 "2019-02-21T14:19:02Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > Simple facts—Trump didn’t win because of his base, who by and large were people who have always voted GOP. He won because Hillary’s personal unfavorability and bad campaigning allowed enough moderates and swing vote independents to find a way to “yes.” And also because not enough black voters turned out to vote the way they did for Obama. Which is likely to be even more the case with Sanders - he is also white, equally un-charismatic, and anti-Semitic attitudes among blacks are unpleasantly common. Plus, [we’ve run the numbers](https://taxfoundation.org/details-and-analysis-senator-bernie-sanders-s-tax-plan/) on his various proposals. > [@](#): > > Senator Sanders’s plan would raise tax revenue by $13.6 trillion over the next decade on a static basis. However, the plan would end up collecting $9.8 trillion over the next decade when accounting for decreased economic output in the long run… > > On a static basis, the plan would lead to 10.56 percent lower after-tax income for all taxpayers and 17.91 percent lower after-tax income for the top 1 percent. When accounting for reduced GDP, after-tax incomes of all taxpayers would fall by at least 12.84 percent… > > Our analysis finds that the plan would increase federal revenues by $13.6 trillion over the next decade. The plan would also increase marginal tax rates on both labor and capital. As a result, the plan would reduce the size of gross domestic product (GDP) by 9.5 percent over the long term. This decrease in GDP would translate into an 18.6 percent smaller capital stock and 6.0 million fewer full-time equivalent jobs. He’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, except not pretty. It would be nice if we could just raise taxes on somebody else and all our problems go away, but TANSTAAFL. Regards, Shodan [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821.md?page=6) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bernie-sanders-makes-it-official-how-far-will-he-go-in-2020/829821.md?page=8)