Who would have won vs Trump- backed by Rove, the GOP and the Kremlin? Not Bernie, certainly.
Maybe. As long as we all know Bernie would have been just as savagely attacked, I can concede there was a tiny chance of him winning. My guess is that he would have done even more poorly, but we’ll never know. We can know the fake news, etc would have hit him hard also.
You do make a good point about the “I’m Mad as Hell” voter. But would Bernie have promised them their lost factory jobs back, their coal mines re-opened? I think not, Bernie was too honest to lie like Trump did.
Sure, most of the write in voters and third party progressives would have voted Bernie.
He couldn’t promise them that the factories and coal mines would re-open, but he could promise them new, better jobs. Then again, any Democrat could promise the same: What’s more important is that he could also promise that those Wall Street fat cats who got the mines and factories closed would pay. Note, I’m not saying that that’s entirely accurate (partly, but not entirely), but it’s a message that Sanders could and likely would sell.
Trump promised that too.
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Bernie and Trump had a lock on the “I’m Mad as Hell and I’m Not Going to Take it Any More” voters. I wonder if the major political parties truly understand this?
Anybody but Hillary. As a life-long conservative Republican, I would have voted for Bernie.
To be perfectly clear: I **DID NOT **vote for Trump. 
Hillary had 2 chances and blew it both times ! I with your post !
I agree with this.
Though I agree that there will be continued exploitation of division, I’m not so sure that “genuine tolerance of divergent political views” can exist when one of those political views is that certain groups of people–Muslims, female, black, Latino, gay, transgendered, etc.–are inherently inferior. Born inferior.
You can’t deny that this is a bedrock belief of much of Trump’s base. And it’s a problem. Because it’s not a belief that can be tolerated.
Oh, sure, I’m not saying that Sanders would have monopolized those voters. But if he split them with Trump, that’d still be enough to get him to victory.
I agree. The venom people aim at Clinton is all out of proportion with her actual words, deeds, and personality traits.
So great a degree of loathing is an unmistakable clue that pure logic and reason are not at work, here.
Though I agree that there was a strain of “I’m mad as hell” in 2016 voting, there was as large or larger a strain of “I want my country back.”
And “I want my country back” was pure racism. Bernie may not have been the choice of the majority of black and Hispanic voters—but he sure as hell was not going to go down the dog-whistle white supremacist road that Trump traveled from his very first press conference.
Bernie would never have won over the “I want my country back” voters. They were enthralled by Trump’s plausibly-deniable racism. Bernie’s anti-corporation message was not attractive enough to lead those voters to choose it over Trump’s white-supremacism.
No, you are not. If you do not understand how absolutely stupid your present tactic of insulting people is then you have no chance whatsoever of understanding what other people need.
None.
Slee
I’m not running for office, so I can say what I want. I’m angry and I don’t care who’s offended by my comments. A lot of the voters in this country are kinda like little puppies who need to have their noses rubbed in the shit that they’ve left on the carpet.
“It is easier to fool a man than to convince him he has been fooled.”
I really believe Bernie would have won. He has a genuine vision and message which, while being perhaps a tad unrealistic, actually does address the needs and concerns of the general electorate. I think that could have stacked up very well against, “blame brown people.” Instead we got Hillary and what was largely a load of triangulated corporate gobbledegook, delivered in a frequently unrelatable/robotic style. Sure, she would have continued Obama’s policies against the brick wall of GOP obstructionism, only far more annoyingly than Obama.
Bernie, if similarly stymied, would at least have been thought-provoking. “Why Does the GOP intend to impoverish every working person to further enrich the wealthy? Are they haters or what?” It coulda been worth a shit…
And let’s not forget, Sanders is a Brooklyn-born Jew who looks and sounds enough like the caricature of that ethnicity, despite all those years in Vermont, to open another angle of dog-whistling attack. New York socialist Jew: Yeh, the “I want my country back” voters would vote for that over Trump? I very much doubt it.
It’s true that Sanders would have been the first Jewish presidential candidate and therefore would have been vulnerable to attacks based on anti-Semitic stereotypes. The alt-right characters with their “((( )))” would be meme-ing away at full throttle - oddly, these people seem to be able to compartmentalize Jews when they’re associated with Trump, like Ivanka and Jared. (It’s kind of ironic that Trump actually has a more personal connection with Judaism than any previous president, given his familial situation.) In any case, yes, I’m sure it would get ugly with the anti-Semitism if Bernie were in the general election. I’m not sure it would be enough to defeat him, though.
Somehow I think, given the relatively mainstream position of secular Jews in the USA, and that Bernie was a very secular Jew married to a Gentile, being Jewish would not be as bad for his electoral prospects in this country as it would be in most other countries.
I think he would have had a very hard time in office; between much of the Democratic Party having been on Team Hillary, and a socialist prez attracting various leftist kooks. But he was a more credible candidate than some people want to admit. Trump took the GOP nomination by raising his own base of voters who didn’t normally vote in primaries and bringing them to primaries; Bernie was doing the same on the Democratic Party side.
Bernie would have brought out more independents than Hillary Clinton – this is indisputable.
But he probably would have under-performed elsewhere among the electorate. He would have under-performed among African Americans. He probably would have under-performed with the moderates who would have been concerned about Sanders’ economic and national security agenda. Without the help of major donors - which Bernie actively pushed away - it would have been hard to compete against Trump in the general election, who despite being his own man still took GOP money.
But even beyond money, there’s something that Trump represented, something that he alone spoke to, and that is the anxiety among whites that their country is being taken over by evil forces. And ultimately I go back to the intelligence of the average voter: if they were dumb enough to pick Trump (and settle for Hillary if you will), then by extension, they’re probably not smart enough to see that Bernie would have been a safer candidate than the disaster we have now.
I think you’re giving too much credit to voters and assume that they would see what you see - that’s not necessarily the case. This is the country that elected GWB twice, after all. The country that voted for a GOP congress because they were convinced that Obama was a communist whose healthcare proposals were going to take white grandmothers from Nebraska and have death panels euthanize them.
“Probably”? I think that seriously understates the case.
As a rule, primary voters (on both sides) are more partisan and more extreme that the electorate in general. Hence the tendency to run back to the middle after getting the nom. A socialist who cannot muster enough votes to get the nom is not going to muster enough votes to win the general election, even if magic happens and he beats Hillary.
Not to mention that (per Wiki)
and
Cite.
Hillary lost in part because she didn’t turn out the black vote. Sanders is even less likely to have done so.
Regards,
Shodan
Do you think a Clinton/Sanders ticket would’ve been a good move? Such that you’d presumably pick up some of those independents you figure he would’ve brought out; but you’d of course still actually have Hillary Clinton as the candidate at the top of said ticket, with an economic and security agenda pitched to moderates?
I’ve wondered a lot about this. I’ve thought that Sanders would have been open to being the vice president had he really been pursued, but it would have been a concession of sorts for Hillary and Bill, and the Clinton’s don’t do concessions. They’re just unbelievably arrogant sometimes and that’s a major reason why she lost. Hillary’s biggest and most fatal flaw was that she believes she’s the smartest person in the room. Every mistake that was made in her campaign, and every mistake she made as Sec of State, can be traced back to her thought process and work style. It wasn’t like she failed because she delegated too much and others just weren’t up to the task. We saw this in 2008 and again in 2016.