…one would hope not.
Complacency certainly was a thing in 2016. Look what it took to barely win in 2020.
LOL. Good luck with that.
Cite?
Actually, @Banquet_Bear had a better cite than I found on a quick scan – and I confused voting age population and voting eligible population, two different things. So actually, 2016 was 1% turnout over 2012. My bad.
Yes, that was a vile thing he did. I wonder if he reflects on that these days.
This ignores reality. Sanders was not as popular as you believe he is.
Don’t get your data from rallies. Any politician can pack a convention hall. Bernie Sanders was able to fill a convention hall with supporters. So was Donald Trump.
But the polls are where you see who the masses of voters support. They reflect the opinions of millions of voters, not thousands. And Clinton got more votes than Sanders did in the polls.
I remember people saying how Hillary Clinton was the worst candidate ever (ignoring the fact that she got more votes than Trump did) and Bernie Sanders would have been a great candidate who would have beaten Trump in the general election if he had been given a chance. But these people have never explained how Sanders was such a great candidate if the worst candidate ever was able to beat him.
The reality is there was no scenario where Bernie Sanders was getting elected President in 2016.
So the choice progressives had was between throwing their support to Clinton and having Hillary Clinton elected President in 2016. Or sitting out the election and having Donald Trump elected President in 2016.
Some progressives have said there was no point in choosing because there was no difference between Clinton and Trump. To those people, I say Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have appointed Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett to the Supreme Court. And the Roe decision would still be intact. That was the difference between Clinton and Trump.
So progressives had better start thinking about the difference between Biden and DeSantis and what they’re going to do in 2024.
I did here. The general election is not the same thing as the democratic primary, it is entirely plausible to concoct a scenario where the party favorite is the worse candidate in the general.
I didn’t find your scenario plausible and I doubt many other people did.
It’s true that the general election isn’t the same as the primaries but in Sanders’ case that was a point against him. Sanders is a progressive. If he was unable to win liberal and moderate votes in the Democratic primaries, there is no reason to think he would have won conservative votes (who tend to be Republicans) in the general election.
Sanders got 43% of the votes when it was just Democrats voting. In a general election with Democrats and Republicans voting, Sanders probably wouldn’t have gotten 35% of the votes.
Sure, but you expect Republicans to use dirty tricks against a Democratic candidate.
I think it is also a good example of how people who are not fundamentally immoral scum will, when confronted with the deeds of immoral scum, shoot themselves in the foot attempting to behave correctly or decently in the face of moral scumitude and often take down others in the process.
Kinda like Dems generally and Obama specifically trying to behave reasonably and decently in the face of the scum known as the GOP generally and Mitch McConnell specifically.
You’re discounting a huge amount of potential voters: Sanders wouldn’t win that many hardcore republicans, but he would inspire a lot of people who are apathetic because they know democrats aren’t actually going to enact any good policies to actually get out and vote. That was the narrative, too, about his primary runs - he was bringing in people, especially young people, who normally wouldn’t participate in the political process. People who might actually stay involved in politics after Bernie was gone if you gave them a reason to think politics could actually be a mechanism by which something might get better in their lives, instead of the democrats’ whole platform of desperately and meekly hoping to make things worse slower.
A significant fraction of this thread is talking about how non-voters are the big problem, but it’s not that hard to understand why people would be apathetic towards voting if they felt as though neither party would actually ever do anything to meaningfully help them. Bernie reached a lot of those people because he’s one of the only candidates willing to unambiguously and loudly call out the problem with both our parties and propose real change.
If all of the democrats who voted for Clinton in the primary voted for Sanders in the general (and they would be good little soldiers, right? After all, voting democrat no matter what is what everyone in this thread is saying is everyone’s moral duties), and Sanders brought in new voters, that’s potentially a better ticket than someone who democratic party loyalists (who are voting democrat no matter what) picked within their primary but who does not have a lot of appeal outside of that group.
Not enough to actually win the nomination.
Party primaries obviously skew heavily towards party insiders and people who heavily identify with the party. Your point is valid, but the fact that Bernie was a real threat even with every party mechanism and news media attempt to discredit him and discourage his voters bodes well for his appeal when he got more exposure in the runup to the national election.
I also think people massively underestimate the degree to which people were sick of the direction the country is going and were willing to throw the dice on someone who seemed like they weren’t part of the shitty system that got us this far. When you run Clinton vs Trump, you run exactly against that zeitgeist - you run the most establishment candidate ever versus a wildcard. A lot of people were sick enough of the way things were going to vote for the wildcard. Bernie undercuts that entire dynamic by being well outside the norm, too.
The primary system favoring party insiders is exactly the sort of shit that got us Clinton, a uniquely terrible candidate, and eventually lead us to Trump. I can’t fucking believe there are people today, still, who are delusional enough to think that Clinton was somehow the right choice in 2016, and somehow it’s the fault of progressive voters (who almost all voted for Clinton) that she lost.
No, it’s about being intelligent enough to see what’s possible and voting where your best interests are. Progressives who didn’t vote in the 2016 general election helped swing the election from Clinton to Trump - which was not in their best interests as we are now seeing in 2022.
Then those non-voters were stupid. The difference was between a party that was going to overturn Roe and a party that was going to keep Roe intact.
And you’re discounting the much larger amount of voters who would have voted against Sanders specifically. For every voter who showed up to vote for him, there would have been at least two voters who showed up to vote against a self-declared socialist.
I love it. A ‘uniquely’ terrible candidate that won millions of more votes than the winner.
We have an electoral system that has allowed the overall minority vote winner to win 3 POTUS elections out of the last 6.
But, sure, let’s come up with bizarre counterfactuals about how different candidates would somehow win over the swing states. You know, those rust belt states that are comparatively more conservative than the ones where these hypothetical “potential” voters might have come out in droves.
I have my doubts about this. The people who are terrified of the word “socialism” are already out voting in droves and are very highly motivated. This is a key part of the republican election advantage.
Your fixation on the raw number of vote counts that don’t matter indicate that you don’t really understand what makes a good candidate. Who cares about total vote counts? They literally do not matter in our electoral system. Are you going to gloat about an irrelevant statistic while you lose elections? If Clinton focused on pumping up her total vote count, rather than vote counts where it matters, then that’s a terrible election strategy.
Yes, Clinton was a uniquely terrible candidate. She was the most establishment candidate ever in an anti-establishment zeitgeist. She had almost 30 years of built in hatred against her, whether it was rational or not, it existed. She was extremely polarizing and alienating - again, often not even her fault, but it doesn’t matter if it was her fault, or whether she would’ve been a good president, what matters is whether she could get elected, and she clearly could not. To lose to a fucking joke candidate that was running his campaign like how 4chan tried to get Mountain Dew to name their new flavor “Gushin’ Granny” means you’re a pretty fucking terrible candidate. Any other generic empty suit democrat would’ve beat Trump in 2016. Clinton was just about the worst candidate that could have been run, and it’s just bizarre that people are still clinging to the idea that it was somehow a good idea to run her.
Your argument is pretty muddled.
So Clinton was an establishment candidate and was seen as such by the voters. But the Republicans were able to portray her as a left-wing extremist. Which you say was a major handicap for her in the general election.
But according to you, Sanders would have done well in the general election because he was a left-wing extremist and that’s what the voters were looking for.
So shouldn’t the Republican efforts to portray Clinton as a left-wing extremist have helped her? It may not have been true but, according to you, that’s what the voters wanted.
You also say that the Republicans wouldn’t have been able to get more voters out to vote against Sanders. So you’re saying there was no untapped reserve of conservative voters and all potential Republican voters showed up on Election Day.
It’s a documented fact that voter turnout was low in 2016. And you’re saying all the conservatives showed up. So are you admitting that the large number of non-voters who stayed home are progressives? Which is the accusation that people have made against progressives; that they caused Trump’s victory by staying home and not voting.
I don’t see any contradiction. The Republicans were trying to appeal to centrist and moderate independents who might agree with lots of Clinton’s centrist views. Point out (or lie) about some of her views that are a bit to the left, and they’ve “proven” she’s a socialist or whatever.
Independents and Democrats to the left of Clinton don’t care what the Republicans say. They look and see a candidate about as conservative as Ronald Reagan on lots of issues being sold as a left-wing choice. To them, Republican talking points about how left she is probably help her, if these people believe the talking points.
This was definitely a problem on Clinton’s messaging. There are many things Clinton and Trump (and Obama) agree on, such as the general pass they give to corporate mergers and monopolies. Maybe Trump turns some of those up to 11, but when Clinton was an 8 or 9, there isn’t much difference.
Anyway, Clinton needed to really play up the many extremely important differences between her and any Republican choice. All I ever got was a bunch of typical rhetoric about helping the American people. Trump said pretty much the same thing, but with some racist dog whistles thrown in.
Sanders (and Warren) at least gave some real progressive policies that they stood behind. If you didn’t like them, tough, vote for somebody else. At least there was a risk, instead of taking it safe.
Finally, for all of the talk about could a non-establishment candidate like Sanders have won. It’s important to remember that Trump was the Republican non-establishment candidate, and he won. If the Republican high ups had been able to make their safe choice in 2014, we’d have probably had another Clinton vs. Bush election.
This is not what I said. I didn’t say Clinton was hated because she was portrayed as a left wing extremist. She was hated for all sorts of reasons - years of conspiracy theories, misogyny, and all sorts of reasons other than being portrayed as a left wing extremist. I’m sure the republicans would’ve painted her that way, as they do to literally every one of their opponents, but that’s not the reason Clinton was a bad candidate.
I was saying that everyone saying everyone would vote against Bernie because they’d label him a socialist is an overblown concern, given that the people who are motivated by such things are already very active voters, there aren’t a lot of new voters that would come out of the woodwork because of it.
You are working really hard to misrepresent that I was saying to try to manufacture some contradiction.
Sanders is not a “left wing extremist”, but he’s not subservient to the rich. He would actually try to enact policies that help the average American at the cost of the rich, which is something democrats sometimes hint they might do, but never would. I have not used the language or made the arguments you claimed I did in the entire thread.
No one outside of the democratic establishment would vote for Clinton because they actually think she would implement economic policies that benefit them at the cost of the rich, since she is one of the key architects in “third way” neoliberalism that was designed to keep the democratic party subservient to the rich.
No, you’re somehow assuming anyone who isn’t a die hard republican voter or maintain democratic voter is a progressive for a desperate gotcha ya here. It’s true that progressive policies are generally favored by a large number of Americans, but it would be a pretty ridiculous stretch to say that everyone who doesn’t bother to vote is a progressive - most of them are apathetic. But one way to break that cycle of apathy is to actually try to work for them, to improve their economic interests.
Obama had it right when he said that people gave up hope that their lives could really be improved in an economic sense so they clung to their religion and guns and all that - he just didn’t realize that the same thing happened to disaffected potential democratic voters - but they, rather than being lead around by the nose by guns/god/whatever, instead became passive and apathetic.
The republican party has become an existential threat. We’re doomed.
I think your math is off.