Trump would have chewed up Bernie and spit him out. But I’m not surprised to see Bernie fans saying “We told you so!” now. Democrats love circular firing squads.
well said. He couldn’t even stand up to the BLM protestors who took away his mic.
I am sorry, but WTF? Mrs Thatcher. Golda Mier. Theresa May. Angela Merkel. Indira Gandhi. Benezir Bhutto?
:rolleyes:
Many women have achieve the top job in many diverse countries. People made it seem like saying anything against Mrs Clinton was a crime against all womankind. “Hillary is not really that accomplished politically” “Oye you hate women”. Actually she was sidelined by Obama in most foreign policy initiatives, her own aides said…" Stop Mansplaining". “She builds upon the Clinton name” “Oh you misogynisyt”.
Maybe if you had stopped to look at her many glaring deficiencies, they could have been addressed and she would have won. Instead of name calling and witty tweets.
You’re simply reinforcing my point. I was replying to a post claiming nobody actually liked Clinton. That’s obviously untrue.
Denying there’s a double standard helps no one. Just because some women overcome sexism at some times, doesn’t deny the women who or times when they did not. The only difference between Clinton and most other politicians is she a woman. Her glaring deficiencies are merely called minor quirks in others.
I don’t approve of name calling as a replacement for critical discussion. But it’s not hard to recognize when women get criticized for things men do with little critique.
I do think that he would have had a better chance at it than Clinton by tapping the anti-establishment vote. But who knows.
Taking the Black vote for granted helped Trump win. He tapped into a feeling that many Blacks have had. Democrats were too worried about flooding Muslims into the country and not enough about Black youth unemployment.
I agree, but not because there was anything wrong with Bernie. I think there is a certain type of voter - people of the land, the common clay of the new west - who want change no matter what, if there isn’t an incumbent to vote for or against. Obama had two terms, they want something different now, and I really don’t think it matters what the characteristics of “the same” or “the different” options are.
The party in power tends to be apathetic, and the change party tends to be motivated, and I’m not sure it matters whether you have Jesus himself or a polished dog turd as the candidate. Bernie running as a Democrat, especially with Obama’s support (which he surely would have had), still would have represented the Democratic party. He would have been attacked on pushing Obama’s progressive agenda and raising everyone’s taxes, but I don’t think it would have changed the outcome. Maybe increased millennial turnout and decreased it among older women/minorities.
After a while with one party, the swing voters notice that their problems didn’t magically disappear, they turn up for the other guy and it looks like a mandate, the party who lost wrings their hands and wonders what they could have done, and no one wants to hear that the answer is “probably not much.”
No. He’s a fucking socialist for christ’s sake. I wouldn’t even have voted for him. Trump would have gotten 400 EVs running against Bernie.
He lost the primary by three million votes. Without all the “fixing” we know for sure happened it might’ve been 2.9 million.
Sanders would have been a dreadful candidate.
Work towards fixing this shit in 2018 and 2020, please. My family is very scared.
According to NPR she has so far won the popular vote so I don’t know what else we could have done.
I voted for Sanders but by the time the primary was over I was so disgusted with the conspiracy “rigged election” bullshit I fully supported Clinton. And this morning every Stein and Harambe write-in is snarking about how their candidate could have beat Trump if only the election hadn’t been rigged.
So they think the primary was rigged, but not the election. Okay.
I’ll give it a shot:
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Clearly Americans want a non-establishment candidate that doesn’t talk like a politician. Bernie fits that bill.
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His campaign would have been more grassroots and populist.
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Polls show that 60% of the voters did not want Trump or Clinton. Third party is not a viable choice so that tells me ANYBODY else (except maybe Ted Cruz) would have had a chance to win.
Bernie would never have been able to convince suburban moms to vote for him. He would have done even worse with Latinos and African Americans than Hillary did. The Democratic donor class would not have gotten behind him with the force that they got behind Hillary. Trump would have made up outrageous but entertaining lies about him and Republicans and Independents would have believed every word. And he would have lost the Deplorables that won Trump the Midwest: they might like some of Bernie’s policies, but to them he’s still a liberal, an elitist, an outsider, a Jew.
Bernie would have been crushed like a bug, and today Hillary’s primary voters would have been tweeting #ShouldaBeenHer
And if this nonsense about how Bernie would have done better continues, then in four years we’ll be fielding an unelectable candidate just like him against Trump (or whoever primaries Trump from the right).
That was assuming the current Primary version of Bernie, which hadn’t been attacked for months by Trump. After a loss like this, its popular to go back to say “well if they had just done it this way”. The fact is we don’t know. The reason why many people, including me, thought Bernie would have lost is because people don’t like Socialists and he was an admitted one. During the primaries, Clinton hardly attacked him on being a socialist, or the whole honeymooning in Russia thing. Imagine “Crooked Hillary” turned instead to “Comrade Sanders” for months and months. I don’t know if Sanders would have done better, I doubt it. Instead of emails, the media would be focused on socialism and communism
Do you think that, if a male Secretary of State was found to have neglected basic cybersecurity precautions, nobody would make a big deal out of it?
Do you think that if a male candidate ran a foundation which took money from foreign leaders, their opponents wouldn’t think to bring it up?
Do you think that if a male Democratic Presidential candidate had voted for the Iraq War while in the Senate, this wouldn’t have been an issue?
It’s true that a lot of people have an irrational hatred of Clinton, and I think it’s obvious that misogyny is a major part of that. I think that (warning: bizarre counterfactual ahead) a man with Clinton’s policies and record probably would have beaten Trump, and that really, really sucks. But that politician would still have been a flawed candidate, relative not only to some ideal candidate but to any presentable nonentity off the bench (Kaine, for instance).
My feeling exactly. The patronizing attitude of Clintons early supports towards the progressives didn’t help either.
Right, because the voters clearly weren’t interested in supporting anyone who was radically opposed to the status quo:rolleyes:
You have nicely expressed my point. 
My point is not that Clinton is flawless, but that her flaws were magnified far out of proportion to what they’d be if she were a man. And this is not an uncommon for women to experience.
I agree that Bernie wouldn’t have pulled this one out, either. Sure he has leftist charisma, but that isn’t what the rest of the country is looking for in a leader. Once Donald starting his Domination Games, Bernie wouldn’t have fought back nearly as deftly as Hillary did and that would have been it.
Larry David as SNL Bernie would’ve fought back brilliantly. Larry David in-character for President in 2020. 
Seriously, Sanders would (a) still be a Senator, from Vermont no less, and thus one of the liberal political elite to a potential Trump voter no matter how outsider-ish his actual policy proposals are, and (b) highly vulnerable to being incessantly mocked as a socialist (not entirely unfairly) or Communist (unfairly, but we’re talking Trump and the GOP here), as has been noted.
Sanders wouldn’t have won because Clinton didn’t lose as much as Trump won. Not Trump the whiny short-attention-span unsuccessful businessman and television personality but Trump the symbol.
[QUOTE=Bruce Wayne]
People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy and I can’t do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I’m flesh and blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed; but as a symbol… as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting.
[/QUOTE]
Once Trump became a symbol of change, rebellion, etc. to a certain class of voter, Trump the symbol could not [del]die[/del] lose the votes of that class regardless of the shortcomings of the man. :eek: Conversely, IMHO, whoever the Dems picked would’ve symbolized the liberal political elite to Trump-inclined voters, regardless of his or her actual record, circumstances, etc. :smack:
This sort of attitude - “Clinton is totally a politician everyone would love except she’s a woman so anyone who doesn’t love her is a misogynist” is exactly the sort of shit that alienates people from wanting to support Clinton and her supporters. It takes exactly the wrong sort of approach to drumming up support for Clinton and against Trump.
In general, Clinton’s supporters did an awful job. About as bad a job as you could to convince anyone to vote for her. “It’s her time! She has a vagina! If you don’t think it’s her time, the only reason you don’t think so is because you hate people with vaginas!”
Between that and “Okay Bernie Bros, you had your fun, but now it’s time to be an adult and accept the inevitable coronation of the all powerful Clinton you silly kids” I had such a fucking hard time overcoming how much her supporters pushed me away to actually vote for her, and I was disgusted with myself for doing so. How many people weren’t able to overcome all the shit you threw at them to vote for her? The fucking supporters of the candidate are supposed to welcome people and encourage them to vote for her, not want to make them spite you because of how you’re treating them.
It was actually the same thing with Obama in 08. I’m not a democrat nor do I like the democratic party. But what I saw on these boards and elsewhere were Obama supporting people being great, inclusive, friendly, positive people. And what I saw of Clinton supporters were being hateful, exclusionary, accusatory (everything is misogyny!), hardened partisan hacks. It (among other things) made me quite confident that Obama was the right choice.
And we had the same dichotomy this time around. The Bernie supporters were the good people that the Obama supporters were, and the Clinton supporters were the same group that forced you to have to get over your desire to avoid being on their team to actually vote for them. In 2008, the party chose right and let Obama be the nominee, and controlled the White House for 8 years. In 2016, they said “nope, not going to let someone steal the coronation from us again, Clinton is absolutely going to happen” and they ultimately gave us President Donald Trump.
You Clinton supporters, your elitism, your desire to call anyone who disagrees with you sexist, your arrogance - you played a significant role in what people rejected Clinton, and you played a significant role in why Donald Trump is going to be the fucking President of our country.