Well if there’s a correlation, if Bernie Sanders was better liked than Hillary Clinton, then why did he receive fewer votes?
How’s that for correlation?
I swear, this is the problem I have with hardcore Bernistas: they’re a lot more like Trump voters than they’re willing to admit, easily hoodwinked into a conspiracy theorist worldview. But point out basic logic, and they’re stumped.
Pot meet kettle. :rolleyes:
See if you can wrap your head around this…
The general election is not the same as the primary election.
Let that sink in and then get back to us.
Also:
In Clinton you had the second most disliked candidate in history, only eclipsed by dislike for Trump (and not by much). Likewise her “favorable” numbers were also very low.
On the flip side Sanders had some of the highest favorability ratings of any politician and lowest unfavorable ratings.
Use your vaunted logic on that.
How much of that was because of Republicans falsely claiming to favor him because he was running against Hillary? I’m thinking of his victories in places like West Virginia, where (based on the 2012 primary results) a huge percentage of Democratic primary voters are Republicans.
Why would someone lie about that on a poll?
Hillary was such a known quantity that her favorable/unfavorable rating was not going to change. It was pretty much seared into the brains of every voter already. Bernie, otoh, was a much less known quantity. His ratings were much more malleable. We really don’t know what they would have been by the time the election rolled around if he had turned out to be the Democratic nominee. Assuming that they would remain what they were when he was “the guy in opposition to Hillary” is a big mistake.
Polls are hard data but vote totals are not, if that’s what you need to make you feel better. Shrug.
I don’t know about that, but you say that as if it were a bad thing. How do you think JFK, Obama and (more importantly) Trump won?
Hillary, OTOH, tried her darnedest to make it about the issues. That sure didn’t do her any good.
Being effective doesn’t make it good.
Getting elected is good. Losing an election is bad. If your tactic to get elected isn’t illegal or unethical, I can’t see what the complaint would be. YMMV.
Trump certainly used unethical (and probably illegal) tactics to win, far beyond the norm. Not seeing that Bernie was doing anything out of the ordinary.
And note that he, also, did not win the election he was in.
If you think that the strategy for winning elections is to nominate those who have lost the election to that nomination, then I will agree that that is not illegal or unethical, but it doesn’t really make much sense either.
As you said, running in a primary election is different from running in a general election. And since he never ran in the general election, we don’t know how well his favorability ratings would have withstood a constant negative barrage of scrutiny that comes with being one of the last two candidates standing.
You want us to accept at face value that Bernie Sanders would have beaten Trump in a general election with favorability ratings that were based on his performance in the primary. That’s yet another logical fallacy. Hillary Clinton had 67% favorability ratings in 2013, just 2 years before the campaign cycle began. My point is, things change. Scrutiny changes perceptions. Anyone can be popular - for a little while. Hillary Clinton defeated your boy - like badly - despite being subjected to decades worth of smears. Sanders felt noticeably uncomfortable the moment anyone brought up the subject of his wife’s abysmal failure to run a private college - that was just one topic. And he wasn’t even close to tasting the heat he would have felt in the general election. Sorry, you can moan all you want, but there’s just no solid evidence that Magic Bernie would have won squat.