No, you’re the one who keeps arguing a ridiculous hypothetical, so the burden of proof is on your end, not mine.
I think that arguments like yours reveal a fundamental lack of reasoning that I keep seeing among Sanders’ diehard supporters. There were primary elections in which millions of people voted, and almost 4 million people voted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders – these are people who are most inclined to vote democratic and progressive. Considering that Bernie Sanders ran to the political left of Clinton, it’s pretty damned absurd to suggest that Sanders would have performed better in a general election with more conservative voters. I really don’t have to say anything beyond that, because it’s fucking self-evident.
See, the problem with the Bernistas is that they occasionally show up for a candidate they’re excited about - Obama, for instance. And then when it comes time to support the agenda that he’s laying out for them, they don’t show up in mid-term elections and give back control to the more motivated Republicans. This is exactly why I say, and I’m 1000% right, that polls . don’t . mean . shit. Every time a president steps forward with a progressive agenda, there is a conservative backlash and the progressives are nowhere to be found in the next election. They’re back to Instagramming or whatever else.
If Bernie, Jill Stein, Ralph Nader, or whoever else is so popular, prove it at the ballot box. There’s one problem: you can’t.
That’s self evident to someone with typical American left-right myopia. Is supporting NAFTA left wing? Were the rust belt people lapping up Trump’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric all lefties? It’s so obviously one or the other, I assume.
Oh, it’s ridiculous now, to suggest that the runner-up in a primary might have won the general? Jesus.
As for proof, I’ve put forward more evidence than you.
I’m no diehard, I didn’t even vote for the guy; I’m still registered Republican in Kentucky and we have closed primaries.
Moving right along, the fundamental issue I see with your argument is that it assumes that the 2016 election was fought on a right/left axis. I disagree. Trump was able to attack Clinton from both the right and the left (on trade, for instance). “Aversion to Other Candidate” was the #1 reason given for why people voted the way they did. This is not normal, it’s a side effect of running the two least popular candidates in modern history against one another.
Most people pick a President the way they pick their smartphone, or their car - they want something that speaks to them, makes them feel good about themselves, supports the narrative they have about their life. 28 million people voted in the Democratic primary. It’s the more numerous casual voters who swing elections, by simple virtue of being more numerous. Even after Obama, Democratic primary voters still don’t understand this: elections are just marketing.
Cite that it’s progressives, specifically, who don’t vote in midterms?
Hillary Clinton did run a terrible campaign. Hillary was well aware of the rules. Team Hillary was well aware of the rules. Their campaign objective was to win enough Electoral College votes to put ol’ Hillary in the Whitehouse. Which they failed to do.
A successful campaign would have resulted in four years of President Hillary. The result of a terrible campaign would mean that ol’ Hillary would be a two-time loser.
It is not really self-evident because I doubt that it is true.
The alternative scenario would be that Clinton beat Sanders because she had a huge purse and was regarded as the “safe” candidate in the early primaries. Had Sanders taken the nomination, he would have been as much of an “outsider” as Trump, without Trump’s narcissism and buffoonery. Sanders would never take the conservative vote, but the enormous middle was not so “conservative” as it was anti-establishment and Sanders had that in spades.
I make no claim that Sanders would have beaten Trump, but the huge number of people who refused to vote for either Clinton or Trump might have included a large enough group to be persuaded to vote for Sanders. Like all the other “what if” scenarios that appear in this thread, yours presumes that your understanding of one factor must necessarily hold true regardless of all other factors. Trump/Sanders would have been a very different race than Trump/Clinton and an arbitrary declaration that conservatism would have sunk Sanders assumes that anti-Clinton feelings are rooted in conservatism when they might well have been more rooted in personal antipathy.
Has nothing to do with myopia. History shows that centrist democrats have won presidential elections; history has shown that democratic socialists have not. I don’t really need to say more than that. If the economic conditions in this country were similar to those of 1932 or 1936, I might be convinced that a candidate like Sanders has a chance to go mainstream. But that’s not the case. Again, the burden of proof isn’t on me; it’s on those who are arguing that a guy who lost a democratic primary by nearly 4 million running as a democratic socialist votes is capable of winning an election against a republican businessman.
It’s not a matter of brains, it’s a matter of survival. Many very smart people depend on the government for employment. Their support of Democrats is very much based on their interests, but I don’t really think you can call it a choice.
Social Security can certainly have that effect, but since the elderly vote in huge numbers they actually hold the whip hand. Both parties support senior entitlements, so seniors can freely choose either party. Welfare beneficiaries and government employees do not have that same luxury. And many liberals are not shy about reminding them what they have to do.
Again, the burden of proof is on you. When has a democratic socialist won a presidential election? How are you going to prove that a candidate that lost a primary election by 4 million votes would have done better in the general election? Barack Obama’s party lost the mid-term elections in 2010 in large part because of Obamacare’s lack of popularity, and the party that has campaigned against expansion of healthcare for 7 years has total control of the federal government – and you’re now asking me to believe that a guy who wants medicare for all is going to win the presidency, despite losing to this horrible opponent by nearly 4 million votes in the primaries? You can cite me poll after poll after poll – polls are not votes. Votes are votes. And that’s where your arguments fail badly. Really, folks, this is not too hard to understand.
Look, Trump did not win just because he was an outsider; he also won for the fact that he promised to honor a conservative platform. That is the part that you do not seem to understand. If the Republican party thought that Trump was just some wildcard who wasn’t going to honor any of their platform, he wouldn’t have made it as far as he did. But he did win because, regardless of what Trump actually believes as a person, he promised to be a conservative president, and he has been everything that Bernie Sanders is not since becoming president. Do you not understand that?! And sorry, but there is no enormous middle; it’s a middle that’s getting smaller and smaller. Bernie Sanders would not have won the election. He might have performed better in some areas but he would have also been worse in some areas. But again, I don’t have to prove this; it’s everyone else here who is engaging in speculative arguments and living in imagination land.
And, of course, history is rife with self-aggrandizing, ignorant, open narcissists who have never held public office or served their country in the military or otherwise, successfully running for president, :rolleyes: so your it has never happened argument is unpersuasive, (without even getting into a discussion of what a democratic socialist might be or whether there has ever been one prior to Sanders’s self-identification).
Give me a break. There’s no damn burden of proof for these alternate history navel gazing arguments. And you ignored my question. Rephrased: was Hillary taking the “left” position on NAFTA or was Trump?
Funny, only a bit over than half of the Trump voters I know would consider themselves conservative. Most voted against the “elites” regardless of political philosophy and your reckoning ignores the huge number of abstentions for whom we do not have an accurate study of their preferences, (to say nothing of the numbers of people who refused to vote for Clinton because they regarded her as too conservative).
Again, I make no claim that Sanders would have inevitably beaten Trump. I only note that your claims for “fucking self-evident” and “common sense” are based on your own beliefs with no more supporting facts than anything else posted here.
In an attempt to bring some focus to this thread, here are the losing presidential candidates since 1900. I haven’t included most third party candidates.
The numbers represent percentage of the popular vote and electoral votes.
1900 - William Jennings Bryan – Adlai E. Stevenson - 45.5% - 155
1904 - Alton Parker – Henry Davis - 37.6% - 140
1908 - William Jennings Bryan - John Kern - 43.0% - 162
1912 - Theodore Roosevelt - Hiram Johnson - 27.4% - 88
1912 - William Taft - Nicholas Butler - 23.2% - 8
1916 - Charles Hughes - Charles Fairbanks - 46.1% - 254
1920 - James Cox - Franklin Roosevelt - 34.2% - 127
1924 - John Davis - Charles Bryan - 28.8% - 136
1924 - Robert La Follette Sr. - Burton Wheeler - 16.6% - 13
1928 - Al Smith - Joseph Robinson - 40.8% - 87
1932 - Herbert Hoover - Charles Curtis - 39.7% - 59
1936 - Alf Landon - Frank Knox - 36.5% - 8
1940 - Wendell Willkie - Charles McNary - 44.8% - 82
1944 - Thomas Dewey - John Bricker - 45.9% - 99
1948 - Thomas Dewey - Earl Warren - 45.07% - 189
1948 - Strom Thurmond - Fielding Wright - 2.41% - 39
1952 - Adlai Stevenson - John Sparkman - 44.3% - 89
1956 - Adlai Stevenson - Estes Kefauver - 42.0% - 73
1960 - Richard Nixon - Henry Cabot Lodge - 49.55% - 219
1964 - Barry Goldwater - William Miller - 38.5% - 52
1968 - Hubert Humphrey - Edmund Muskie - 42.7% - 191
1968 - George Wallace - Curtis LeMay - 13.5% - 46
1972 - George McGovern - Sargent Shriver - 37.5% - 17
1976 - Gerald Ford - Bob Dole - 48.0% - 240
1980 - Jimmy Carter - Walter Mondale - 41.0% - 49
1984 - Walter Mondale - Geraldine Ferraro - 40.6% - 13
1988 - Michael Dukakis - Lloyd Bentsen - 45.6% - 111
1992 - George H.W. Bush - Dan Quayle - 37.45% - 168
1996 - Bob Dole - Jack Kemp - 40.7% - 159
2000 - Al Gore - Joe Lieberman - 48.4% - 266
2004 - John Kerry - John Edwards - 48.3% - 251
2008 - John McCain - Sarah Palin - 45.7% - 173
2012 - Mitt Romney - Paul Ryan - 47.2% - 206
2016 - Hillary Clinton - Tim Kaine - 48.2% - 227
Now if you were to take these thirty-four campaigns and rank them from best run to worst run, where would you place Clinton’s 2016 campaign? At the top? At the bottom? In the top half? In the bottom half? In the middle of the pack?
What factors would you use when placing it in that position?
Which of the other campaigns would you be placing next to Clinton’s campaign? Why would you choose those campaigns?
Assuming you didn’t place Clinton’s campaign at the top or the bottom, which campaigns would you place in those spots? Which would be your top five and which would be your bottom five? Why?
I ignored it because it was a stupid, irrelevant question. The election wasn’t won because of Hillary’s position on NAFTA; it was won because it’s white ‘Merikuh’ against the rest of America, and the former flexed its muscle and took its country back from the invading hordes. Trump’s victory was not just a win over Hillary, but a counter-revolution against the Obama and progressive politics. Bernie Sanders would have been in the same trap, and he would have been labeled a democratic socialist to boot.
Trump won the primaries; Bernie Sanders did not. Trump won the primaries for the party that controls the white house, controls the congress, controls the judiciary, and controls nearly 2/3 of all state governments. Bernie Sanders…is an independent “democratic socialist”. I don’t know why this is so hard for some people to understand.