Guns. Bernie comes from a rural state with a different attitude about guns than the urban elites. Gun control shouldn’t be a high priority — Heck, Bloomberg’s “stupid” ban on over-sized soft drinks would probably save more lives than gun control would! Bernie supports much gun control (D-minus voting record from the NRA) but tempers that with acceptance of rural priorities. The D’s should have embraced Bernie’s approach here; instead they attacked it. :smack:
Bernie did win some primaries. And, whereas Hillary was winning the primaries of states which have no effect on the general election — sure-blue states like Calif and sure-red states like Alabama — Bernie won some swing states: Colorado (59-40), Minnesota (62-38), Wisconsin (57-43).
Don’t underestimate the cigar smokers in those proverbial smoke-filled rooms. If they still existed, they’d have sen that Hillary was a weak candidate and gone with Bernie … or drafted Biden.
Yes. And Biden is also getting old. Warren is too divisive; other Senators lack Presidential gravitas. The City of New Orleans is an American icon, but does the ex-mayor of a city whose population is barely a quarter of San Antonio’s population really seem qualified to leapfrog to the Presidency?
Where’s our Knight in Shining Armor? Time is running out.
How so? The way I see it is Sanders is the only person proposing long term solutions. The way I understand it is wages have stagnated, what little rise there has been has been met with increased cost of living. Wealth inequality has drastically increased, the middle class is dwindling, and our deficit is growing from increased gov spending and slashed gov revenue. Bernie Sanders outlined some things that would help improve all of this.
Cut back on our corporate welfare checks.
Give people everyone healthcare so people aren’t losing their livelihoods over medical debts, and increase the preventive measures so people go to the doctor before they’re in dire need of medical treatment.
Give students free college tuition, and more importantly bail out student debt.
First thing can help us increase gov revenue to improve the deficit. Second puts more money in the pockets of people who spend their money by eliminating private health insurance, people dont have to potentially die from not being able to afford medicine, and so they don’t have to pay a health insurance company to not cover a medical procedure they didn’t know they’d need, forcing them to pay out of pocket and or go into debt. And third is just an investment in our future, and the future of our democracy.
The way I see it, is Bernie Sanders essentially wants to distribute money to the bottom so it goes upward, instead of throwing money at billionaires expecting them to invest more, expand businesses, and increase wages. Right now we have a bunch of people living paycheck to paycheck, we have small businesses unable to expand because they can’t save up 500 extra dollars, we have people dying because they can’t afford medicine that our tax dollars subsidize the cost of R&D for only to be sold back to us at 100-500% the price it’s sold overseas. He’s good for our economy, and he’s good for our social programs.
Bernie Sanders is the candidate Donald Trump is hoping he gets to run against in 2020. Trump would have an easy time defeating Sanders.
You have to accept this reality; most Americans don’t support Sanders’ agenda. Saying that it’s a good agenda and Americans should support it doesn’t matter. They don’t like it and that’s the reality.
That’s the reason Clinton beat Sanders in 2016. More people preferred Clinton’s policies over Sanders’. And that was among Democrats. Do you imagine there’s some untapped base of Sanders voters among Republicans?
Clinton got sixty-five million votes in 2016. Sanders would have been lucky to get fifty million. He would have lost the popular vote as well as the Electoral College vote.
I disagree trump would have an easy time defeating sanders. Many trump voters ironically support many of Bernie’s policies. Such as pulling our troops out of the middle east, improving peoples healthcare, and just generally improving the middle class. We can break these voters down into two types, 1) intentional and 2) ignorant. Some of these people want people to NOT have healthcare, they want war, they want racism and bigotry, they want tax cuts for the rich. While the others are ignorant as to what positions the parties hold, some of them actually believed Trump would increase medicare and social security, would pull out of overseas conflict, stop funding saudi’s terror in yemen, and completely remove nafta. These people can and will be bernie supporters. The big things that turned them off from bernie is two major issues, 1) He ran as a democrat, and 2) he said he’s a socialist. They’re ignorant they take things on face value, but if you can get them to admit they like bernies positions they’ll come around. I’ve met trump supporters who I’ve convinced to support M4A, it’s really not that odd of a thing to happen. It’s quite common for trump supporters to be former Obama voters for example. I think you and many other people take your knowledge for granted, the country is far more ignorant than you think.
I also disagree with people preferring hillary policies over bernie, I think more people knew who Hillary Clinton was and thought she was the person they should vote for. But if you asked those people now, why did they vote for hillary not many of them can say why. Some will say because they didn’t like A, B or C about Bernie, but how many of them will tell you a Hillary policy they preferred over bernie? Not very many, in my personal experience it seems like people at least around here don’t even know what Hillarys positions were. But if you ask a Bernie or Trump supporter they’ll list off dozens of positions they like.
Again, I don’t think Hillary’s number of votes really indicate Bernie’s chances of winning, or Hillary’s primary win indicating Bernie’s power as a candidate against Trump. I think this is a very obtuse way of looking at it, especially this day in age where a single tweet can blow up giving you thousands of followers overnight. Why do I feel this way, well like I said before most people are ignorant about politics. People such as yourself give our voters the benefit of the doubt, you assume they actually know the policies the candidates or even parties they can vote for hold. They don’t, and we should assume they’re on the fence about who they’ll vote. It’s just a matter of conveying the policy to them in a way they’ll understand or be willing to understand. Many trump supporters are actually bernie bros, now whether or not Bernie is capable of conveying his message to people who inherently want to disagree with him is a perfectly fine argument in my opinion and I might even agree with you on that. However this notion Bernie would lose to Trump is absurd to me even despite the 2016 primaries.
Edit: for a bit of insight on my anecdotal claims, I live in the heart of trump land down south. There are more people than I can count who I’ve met that voted for trump but actually support Bernie, they just hate hillary and the democratic establishment with passion. It’s one of the amazing things about trump supporters, their views are so drastically different yet they unify under him. Some of them genuinely disagree and dislike bernies policies, while others unknowingly agree with them, and others do agree with his policies but vote trump because they like more of trumps policies (wall, tax cuts, pro guns, anti-abortion, etc…).
If throwing Bernie at them and being anti-Hillary, anti-Dem establishment will unify these people and get them on our side, then I don’t see why on earth we would risk throwing in some corey booker, or hamala harris or of all people beto… Bernie seems like the stronger candidate to me, the fact he’s an outside of the Democratic party plays in his favor. His positions align with many non-bernie bro trump supporters as well. Anti-establishment, anti-corruption, talks about improving americans lives, doesnt want US meddling with affairs overseas. These things can and will click, especially now that a growing number of Trump supporters are feeling the effects of trump, and begging to dislike Trump.
One thing most people are ignoring is these trump supporters don’t magically disappear, are we going to just silence them and hope they go away? No, they’re going to keep shouting and kicking. The best thing to do is to give them someone to throw their chips in on and that someone is definitely Bernie Sanders.
This is the most-wrong thing you’ve said in a thread where you’ve said a *lot *of wrong things. Trump would beat Sanders like a rented mule. “He’s not even a Democrat! Socialist! Communist!”
I’m sure he’s a nice guy. But if other Democrats - myself included - think he’s too radical, with too many pie-in-the-sky promises and not a lick of sense about how to actually achieve them, think of what the GOP machine would do to him. He would have gotten killed in 2016 - we’re talking a Reagan - Carter-esque landslide - and he’d get killed even worse in 2020.
Why are we even talking about someone that will be 79 in two years and is a senator in the second-smallest state in the country (in terms of population)? Just to put it in perspective: Romney is from Utah, a state with around 3 million people – or five times the population of Vermont. Vermont’s a lovely place, but the idea that the state is a good barometer of a candidate’s elect-ability in a general election is silly.
What does support Sanders as the front runner mean? What are my duties as a supporter of Sanders as the front runner in 2018 and what are my metrics for success? Will that geezer still be alive in 2 years?
This is the FIRST thing I think of WRT Sanders. I’m 57, and am REALLY READY for folk my age - or preferably YOUNGER - taking the reins. Fucking paper said all the top 3 Dems in the incoming Congress are in their 70s. WTF! :smack:
I am quite liberal, leaning towards socialism on many issues. But as others have observed, I was not impressed with the practicality of many of Sanders’ proposals.
Most importantly, tho, I question the nomination of a candidate who presents so many easy reasons for folk to vote against them. The vast majority of Repubs would vote against Bernie, and even many Dems would react overly to the word “Socialism.”
Heck, I don’t know what type of candidate America will be comfortable voting for in 2020. Being an older white guy myself, I’m really tired of the reign of old white guys. I was shocked that we elected a black man, but then was even more shocked at what I perceived as anti-Hillary misogyny. I don’t know if folk would’ve disliked Hillary “as a woman” if she hadn’t had so much other baggage. But there are HUGE portions of our country who are eager to vote AGAINST a minority if any aspect of their race/religion/gender/views can readily be portrayed in a negatively.
Actually, what’s closer to the truth is that democrats who DID support Bernie Sanders are the ones who helped put Trump in office because they were vindictive and refused to vote for Hillary Clinton.
We don’t have to believe that Bernie would do worse than Hillary. We KNOW that he does worse than Hillary. He went head-to-head with Hillary and he lost. Queue-Eee-Frickin’-Dee.
No one is under any duty to unite behind a putative frontrunner. Come to think of it, that’s *exactly *what happened to the Democratic Party vis-a-vis Hillary Clinton in the lead-in to 2016. She was the annointed one, let no one dare challenge her. And everyone wanted to NOT have a primary like the GOP with a flavor of the week, so as to not spend their cash up front. Which deprived the Dems of a real competitive primary with fresh faces bringing varied issues and getting them tested in fire.
Sure, everyone thought they’d coast against Shorfingers just on the basis of “hey, we’re normal and safe”. But the answer to that is ***not ***“let’s ourselves annoint a messianic figure and fall in behind them”.
Do we want a platform with solid progresive proposals that does make consideration for broad segments of the public? Then let candidates show up with their pitch of how they are going to achieve that, prove they can convey it to the people who need to hear it, and let them at it so at the end there is a tested leader and tested message. They can themselves be old, young, leftist, centrist, white, black, male, female – let the people test them and choose. (Trying to assemble the perfect winning candidate a-priori has a mixed record, anyway)
The OP’s presidential namesake, may we remind ourselves, won his nomination in 2008 against a Hillary who fought until the last possible moment. That made him a stronger, better candidate. Sure, we know that a lot of the “oh God no more Family dynasties” side of the Party was heavily in favor of Obama even at the start, but he still won fair and square (and delivered us from turned-out-to-be-scum John Edwards).
That’s rich, said in support of someone who will not even formally *join *the party.
Yup. It used to be that the GOP were the ones who made this mistake, but it seems we need to do it for Bernie because remember that time a bird landed on his podium? Also, isn’t it time we gave an old white guy a chance to run America?
I don’t know if a pollster or statistician has done a careful peer-reviewed study, but June polls found Sanders doing about 9% better than Clinton against Trump. That, and the primary votes from swing states make me suspect that Yes, Sanders would have been elected had he been nominated.
(FTR, I think Hillary would have made a better President than Bernie.)