An excellent point. The numbers in this poll are generally quite different than other polls I have seen.
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.)
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.
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.
I’ll grant your basic point that the situations are grossly dissimilar, and I agree that Sanders should have withdrawn before he did.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.
Bernie taking it via superdelegates after being on his high horse about them all through the primaries would have been rank hypocrisy.
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.
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).
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 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.
It’s difficult to know what other people know, but information can be found on a 10 minute search.
He has said he doesn’t belong to a religious organization, but he is religious. The polls showed people not very interested.
Well, he loved the experience of his honeymoon in the Soviet Union anyway.
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.
No doubt. Some of it may even be true.
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.
Politico
Reddit discussion 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,
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Upon review, that came across way angrier than I intended.
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.
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.
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”.
Washington Post then followed it up with a fact check of their own, which can be read here:
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.
Except for the nomination being decided part.
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. He won because of the missing Obama millions. 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.
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 on his various proposals.
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