Holding the line in the House and trying to narrow the gap in the Senate (AND the Statehouses!), whatever happens with the Presidential race, should be the Og-damned rock bottom default baseline expectation of the DNC’s efforts. If it were only their fallback position *after *failing to stop Sanders, and they’re viewing “stop Sanders” as Job One in and of itself, then they’d deserve to perish.
Nah; this doesn’t matter. It’ll be “fake news. More lies from Trump. Just Russian propaganda. Fox news always repeats Trump’s lies. The CIA/FBI/NSA said so? Why should I trust them; didn’t you say they made up stuff about Trump and Russia?”
Nothing in Bernie Sanders supposed past will matter to anyone who isn’t already dead-set against him.
The reason Bernie will get the nod isn’t just because Bernie, but because so many people are ready for the Democratic Party to change from the ineffective milquetoast bullshit that it is.
I don’t want Sanders to go away. I want Trump to go away. And the problem I have with Sanders is I don’t think he can beat Trump.
Bernie will be a disaster in the general. Not just his past support for dictatorships, or his weird sex stories, or his crazy comments such as saying that bread lines are a good thing, but his current policies.
For example, his promise to ban fracking. I guess Democrats didn’t need Pennsylvania, or Ohio, or Indiana, or Michigan, or…
The Liberals in Canada campaigned on shutting down fossil fuel production in favor of ‘green’ technologies. Guess how many seats the Liberals carried west of Manitoba, and east of Vancouver? ZERO.
On the other hand, the other Democrats currently running have also promised to ban fracking. Which means political suicide is not just a Bernie thing.
Fracking has been the biggest economic improvement to happen to the midwest, and the primary reason why the US’s CO2 emissions are falling. They aren’t giving it up because a 79 year old socialist says they should. And you know Trump will play off this and promise THE BEST FRACKING EVER. More fracking. There will be so much fracking that you’ll be swimming in money! It’s an easy argument for Trump, because banning fracking at this point is beyond stupid.
And then you will have the unions discovering that Bernie is going to take away their gold-plated health care and make them line up with the rubes in a giant government health system. By the way, the waiting list for an MRI in Alberta just hit one year. I’m sure Trump will be more than willing to claim that that’s what’s in store for everyone - including those who have great insurance now.
Democrats are making the mistake of thinking that having a ‘base’ that leans towards socialism is representative of the country. The reality is Majority of Americans Won’t Vote for a Socialist
That’s from a year ago. So you’ve got 24% of the country perhaps. That’s pretty much the liberal wing of the Democratic party, and no one else.
Hey look, everyone! Another post from across the border that claims to understand Americans better than Americans do!
:rolleyes:
I don’t agree with your analysis. I think in most of these examples, you’re stretching the candidates’ positions to make your point. I don’t see any major ideological difference between Gore and Bradley, Kerry and Dean, or Clinton and Obama. These candidates were all moderates. The liberals in these campaigns were people like Brown, Kerrey, Kucinich, Sharpton, and maybe Vilsack. The only case you listed where a moderate beat a liberal was Clinton beating Sanders in 2016.
You’re factually wrong about Gore and Clinton losing the general election. Both of them won the general election (which was part of my point). They lost the Electoral College election. (Kerry may have won the general election also but it’s late in the day to be arguing that point.) This just demonstrates what I’ve already said; we have a system that favors Republicans. They can lose the general election and still win the Electoral College election because their base gets more votes.
Oh, you think we have unions. How adorable.
Say what now? You did nothing of the sort.
As a union member, let me tell you: you’re wrong about this. This isn’t a talking point that union members have. To the extent it has been talked about by union members as something to fear, we all know they are shilling for other candidates.
The truth is that unions are built on the concept that we can do better together than we can separately. Union members have and will overwhelmingly support Bernie because he wants the entirety of society to act that way.
And we do too. Here, I’ll prove it:
Union members aren’t stupid and we don’t have the same “ME ME ME” values that conservatives do. “Better for everyone” is gonna be better for us too; that’s what “everyone” means.
This part of your post was particularly ignorant and I felt it should be pointed out.
I’m in a Pennsylvania union, and have been a little shocked at the people I eventually find listening to Rush or otherwise living in a pro-Trump world.
Honestly, it’s not even Obama’s party anymore. It’s Bernie’s party now - that’s what happens when you’re the most popular candidate. It’s Bernie’s party now. Just like it was Mondale’s party in 1984, like Dukakis in 1988, and like McGovern in 1972. He won’t lose as badly as they did because Trump is historically unpopular, but unless the economy craters, I don’t see how he wins.
We need to do what we can to support Bernie, even if we don’t want to - maybe the economy slows, maybe Trump alienates people enough, and maybe we have an impact. We have to defeat Trump or die tryin’ (to steal from 50 cent).
He could also be another FDR. We’ll find out in November.
To your point, I won’t disagree with you and I’d say to dalej and other fellow skeptics: we can bitch about Bernie all we want, but the alternative is clearly worse. Donald Trump is infinitely worse than Bernie Sanders and there’s no debate about it. If Bernie wins, he’s my guy. Period.
Bernie is the only significant candidate who was born before that Pearl Harbor kerfuffle. He will turn 80 in September of '21.
My mother is 87 and still has a large contingent of her marbles. But 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is brutal on anyone who sits at the Resolute desk. Which is not that big a deal, as long as the second-string president is well chosen. I am hoping Bernie, if nominated, will gracefully submit that choice to the convention, which would be an excellent move, I think.
Yeah, because
is totally just a single quote that’s taken completely out of context. If you want more quotes where Sanders campaign officers, representatives, and superdelegates make barely veiled arguments that superdelegates should have gone against the will of Democratic primary voters, I’ll be happy to provide those as well. Don’t worry, the breadth of available content is amazing.
Here:
The problem with these “moderate lane” takes is that they’re only valid for the candidates; there is no “moderate lane” of voters. Most primary voters don’t think of ideology that way, and if the “moderate lane” candidates start to drop out, Bernie is likely to be the main beneficiary.
That’s not actual data. It’s fine that you think Biden is a “safe” candidate, but that doesn’t actually mean anything. I think Bernie is a much safer candidate (but this is just IMO). There is no data that tells us which candidate is “safe”, especially not at this point in the election cycle.
The GOP does resort to cheating and lies to win. Kerry would have won in 2004 had the Lie Machine not made the war hero Kerry look like a malingering soldier instead of Bush, who really was a malingerer. Gore might have won in 2000 without partisan cheating in Florida.
BUT … [I have a pet peeve] …
… the electoral college system favors the GOP but this is not due to any recent “rigging.” I wish people would stop talking about the Ds “winning” elections that they lost. Would they say these things if, by happenstance, the parties were reversed?
Baseball games are decided by which team has the most runs, not the most hits. Nine-ball is won by sinking the nine-ball, not most balls. The Presidency is won by most electoral votes, not most popular votes. Is this hard to remember?
There’s also no data that tells is which candidate would be “the best” in the White House either, so I guess there’s no use in speculating about that, now.
I think someone who is as close to Hillary without being Hillary is the safest, and my reasoning is that there only needs to be a tiny difference of votes in a small amount of states, and we have four years of Trump showing us who he really is and four years of demographic shift as a tailwind. The voter rolls have churned by hundreds of thousands of voters dying and entering in the past four years just in the extremely close swing states, which results in a net shift of tens of thousands of people naturally gravitating away from Trump.
It would be another story if the Democrats needed to flip several states by 6 or more digits rather than 5. That might justify plumping on a relatively unknown quantity and hoping the enthusiasm will make up for the red-baiting.
Which isn’t to say Bernie will pretty surely not win: I’d be a fool to not give polls at least some weight. I just find it hard to wrap my head around the possibility that enough new voters will be thinking “wow, I’m really impressed with Trump and would like four more years of the same!” to allow him to keep the swing states unless that is counterbalanced by people who won’t vote for a socialist.