And maybe five people have ever heard of him.
I don’t know if Schweitzer would be a great candidate (though I don’t have any problem with him at the moment), this doesn’t matter that much – Obama wasn’t terribly well known until his campaign was well into its swing. Neither was Bill Clinton.
They had both been keynote speakers of the previous Democratic national convention and had been touted as rising stars during the intervening three-ish years (for Clinton, actually closer to a decade) before they announced their respective candidacies.
Sam Nunn once joked that given his first election as governor in 1978 that Bill Clinton managed to be a “rising young star” across three decades.
Obama got a lot of buzz after his keynote address. Clinton kind of bombed. Bill hit what is usually the death knell for a speech - the only time he got any cheers was when he said “In conclusion…”
Regards,
Shodan
You mean except FDR, Harry Truman, LBJ, even Barack Obama. Sanders would almost certainly have won against Trump, only Hillary Clinton was unpopular enough to possibly lose against fucking Donald Trump.
So Bernie Sanders was more popular than Trump, but not as popular as Hillary, who was not as popular as Trump. And because Sanders was able to galvanize enough people that he couldn’t get the nomination.
Not sure I agree 100% with your detective work there, Lou.
Regards,
Shodan
The composition of the primary and general election electorates are different. By this logic, McGovern was the strongest Democratic candidate in 1972 and Goldwater the strongest Republican in 1964 simply because they were able to win their parties’ respective nominations.
FDR, Harry Truman and LBJ were from a different political era and thus aren’t directly comparable to modern progressives, anymore than Eisenhower or Nixon are directly comparable to modern conservatives.
Barack Obama was not a progressive, he was a MOR Clintonian Democrat. Much to the disappointment of the many progressives who deluded themselves that he was one of theirs. The only thing sillier than their horrified squeals when he didn’t turn out to be liberal as they had talked themselves into believing he would be, were the conservatives that derided him as a “socialist.” For the most part Obama was about as centrist as they come. The primary difference between Obama and Hilary Clinton is one was far more charismatic and could project more sincerity than the other ( real or not, fair or not ).
McGovern and Goldwater *were *the strongest candidates each party could come up with.
If you are saying that some progressive would win the general election but not the Democratic primaries, then why doesn’t some third party progressive like Ralph Nader or someone ever get anywhere in the general election? Answer: because the primary process tends to select candidates who are further to the extreme, and then the candidate runs back to the middle and wins or loses in the general election by being more moderate than their primary supporters would like.
Regards,
Shodan
Dude, cheer up. The Democrats will nominate as their 2020 candidate the person who receives the most votes in their primary, whether the Clintonista party bosses like it or not. And those bosses are already losing their power within the party to progressives, so their repertoire of dirty tricks will be smaller. The link is to a cheesy clickbait website, but refers to this paywalled article from the WSJ. Assuming that we can survive (literally and figuratively) the next four years, the opening for actual change is wider than it’s been in a very long time.
This was all hashed and rehashed in this forum prior to the election. While Sanders was still in the race, polls consistently showed that he would handily beat Trump, while a race between Clinton and Trump would be close. The Clinton team argued that these polls were meaningless; obviously in retrospect we know they were at least half right.
Pointing out these well known facts about the recent election =/= asserting some general principle of politics which applies across all elections in all eras.
By the way, Qin Shi Huangdi’s TLDR post on the first page of this thread was really, really good, and everyone should be sure to read it.
I dunno. I live in Illinois, so Obama isn’t a fair comparison, but I follow politics fairly closely, and I don’t recall having heard of Clinton before his Presidential campaign. Gore, of course, was best known for having the nutty wife on her crusade against “porn rock”.
Are those the same polls that said Hillary would beat Trump? Why are the polls that show that Bernie would win valid, but the ones that showed that Hillary would beat Trump are invalid?
The notion that Democrats don’t win because they aren’t “progressive” enough is an SDMB fantasy, because the SDMB is well to the left of the American electorate. Of course Bernie would win, if only the SDMB voted. Hillary lost because she did not trigger the turnout that Obama did, because she isn’t black. Not because she isn’t “progressive” enough.
Regards,
Shodan
Because the polls weren’t that off in the first place-a lot of the polls had Trump either narrowly leading or at least in the margin of error. Secondly, those polls also had Sanders leading by a far larger margin and with a far greater favourability rating.
Sanders would have won not so much because he was more “progressive” in the SDMB sense but because he would have been regarded as an anti-Establishment populist in a very anti-Establishment year and because his agenda of social democracy has a broad-enough message to build a larger coalition.
Saying that a politician has an “agenda of social democracy” is the same thing as saying he is a progressive. And again - he can’t build a large enough coalition so that he can win the primaries where the voters are well to the left, but he’s going to build a large enough coalition to win among moderates and conservatives. Like I said, that’s fantasy.
If it weren’t fantasy, he could have run as an independent the way he said he was during his tenure in Congress and won. But it is fantasy.
It’s like the notion that Trump won because the Dems didn’t call the other side names loud enough. That isn’t how it works.
Regards,
Shodan
True. OTOH, those polls were also talking about a hypothetical matchup several months before the actual election, so we certainly can’t say Sanders would have definitively beaten Trump. Polling is a probabilistic exercise; you can’t say that the polls were “wrong” because they predicted Clinton would probably win, and then the slightly less probable outcome occurred.
What we can say is that, based on the best information available while Democrats were voting in primary elections, Sanders would have been a better choice to win. The majority of voters chose to overlook that information, and the outcome was bad. And this horse, despite vigorous beating, is still dead.