What Democratic candidate could have won against Trump in the 2016 elections?

Politics & Elections
41

Free college to all as one, free Medicare for all, and passing it in what already an obstructionist congress? To be clear, I understand that Sanders is speaking from a ideological ideal - YES, they wouldn’t be “magic” if he could have gotten the much higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy he intended, but, to be blunt, that was never going to happen in the political climate as it stood in 2016, much less today.

He was promising a glorious future that any rational voter could see as a great ideal but utterly unlikely to happen.

And no, at NO point did I suggest he was worse than Trump. Trump is a horror, and a tragedy, and likely the final nail in any hope of American government ever trying to represent all the people and not JUST their own party.

If anything, I’m saying that Sanders made impractical promises, but with the intent of uplifting the average American. Trump made impractical promises by catering to the worst instincts of the average American.

As for opinion pieces on why all of the various individuals, again in perfect 20/20 hind later said “Oh, Bernie could have won” - well, they also don’t want to look stupid, and don’t want to blame the electorate.

And as for the one from Trump’s team, I believe, as do a number of other posters, that Trump originally didn’t want to win - he was surprised at his own success, and happy at the grifting opportunities and the fueling of his narcissism, but being president wasn’t (IMHO) the original goal.

And (I can’t believe I’m saying this) while Trump of 2016 was horrible and unqualified, he wasn’t the utterly detached from reality gasbag that 4 plus years of Fox news and sycophants inflating his alternate reality made him.

42

Huh, I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe Sanders would have had an advantage there. Just like Trump campaigned on lots of lies about what he would do in office, Sanders may have done well by promising a bunch of stuff that there was no chance he would have delivered.

So, he may have picked up some of those who want to believe comforting lies, but I would have had a hard time voting for him, knowing that he was promising a fantasy that he’d never be able to deliver.

Everything that Clinton said she would do, I believed that she had an actual path towards accomplishing. There are no guarantees, and her policies may have never made it, but at least it was realistic, unlike Sander’s platform.

But, I guess it could have been interesting watching a campaign of two old men building castles in the air.

43

I’m in the camp that thinks that Sanders would have been deemed the embodiment of Lenin, Castro, and Mao all balled into one, and everybody in the country would have heard some iteration of “he’s going to outlaw owning a business” (whether they’d believe it, of course, is another matter; if they watched Fox, or voted Republican, it would be a fait accompli).

But, I do think that some of Trump’s supporters were likely disaffected Bernie supporters, and that Bernie might have also siphoned off some Trump support that was seeking “change” or “something different than what we’ve always done.”

I just don’t know if that would have overcome all of those people who would have been freaked out that “crazy” Bernie Sanders (you just know the opposition would have leaned into pictures of his unkempt hair) was going to make it “illegal to own things”. The propaganda machine would have been over the top.

44

College used to be free (or near enough). Free healthcare is done in most of the world (or near enough). These are not magical impossible things. They are things that are a reality in many places.

I get congress is obstructionist but, frankly, they are obstructionist to Biden too. And Obama. So, why not shoot for the moon?

45

I totally endorse @ParallelLines’ perspective here. And eloquently delivered.

Said another way, Trump was attractive to all the Rs and repellent to all the Ds. Whereas Sanders would have been repellent to all the Rs, and half the Ds, while only half the Ds would really support Sanders.

In a world where most of us didn’t really believe quite how awful Trump would be, that difference leads to a massive Trump victory under low D turnout, not the squeaker vs. Hillary that it actually was.

Said yet another way …

Measured versus the mid-2016 Overton Window during the height of the campaign, Sanders was wacky far distant no-hope left outside the Window. Trump was an especially boorish example of hovering right adjacent to the current right edge of the same Window. “Saying the quiet stuff out loud” was a common trope for a very good reason. Lots of powerful folks had already made that stuff in-Window, as long as it was said quietly enough.

Where Trump really was different in office was not in policy. It was in how nakedly he tried to suborn the whole government not for his ideology and that of his electoral party, but simply for his personal enrichment and pursuit of Power qua power.

It is always the case that the right has more pull over the Overton Window than the left does. It’s the difference between simple ideas and complicated ideas. Between monomania and “on the other hand …”

What Gingrich et al did to the Window in the last 30 years will take over a hundred, or a revolution, for the left to undo.

Other countries’ examples have little pull on any country’s Window. The USA is especially immune to considering the example of other countries. SO citing how out of whack our Window is vs. e.g. Canada, the UK, or Germany is essentially beside the point. You’re correct they’re different. But that fact has no ability to affect the local situation. Only home-grown effort will have any effect.

46

Some quibbling on values of free, but yes. These are good things, and to be hoped for, and striven for. We agree!

But here’s the rub. America is deeply, Deeply conservative in many ways. Slow to change, and with many entrenched reactionaries, who are protected by political influence to the point of being un-removeable for the foreseeable future.

So yes, it’s (in a perfect world) a great idea to shoot for the moon, to strive for the best. In the real world however, you get someone who says, as a not so random example, “Yes we’ll take your guns” and increases their opposition turnout, putting the worst possible candidate in place.

Or in other words, I’d prefer to live in the best of all possible worlds, but here I strive to prevent the worst of all possible worlds from happening tomorrow, while trying to make the world better one step at a time.

47

I agree. There was a lot of “burn it down” rhetoric among both Sander’s and Trump supporters. Since they couldn’t get Sanders, they settled for lighting the place up by supporting Trump.

That’s the only advantage that Sanders had over Clinton. People that supported Clinton in the primary would have voted for Bernie in the general, but a large contingent of those who voted for Bernie in the primary didn’t vote for Clinton in the general. As sad as it is, appealing to immature and poorly educated voters may actually be the only winning strategy going forward.

48

Sure, any Democrat would have been the target of the Republicans’ hate machine, but I think Sanders was in a position to be uniquely resistant to it. If you call him a dirty socialist, he’ll answer “Yes, absolutely, and proud of it”. Everything the Republicans could use to attack him, was already common knowledge. And even with all of that being common knowledge, he still polled considerably better than Clinton, vs. Trump.

Plus, a lot of the folks who voted Trump did so not out of ideology, but because they had a firsthand view of the fact that the status quo was broken, they were mad as hell about it, and they wanted someone else who was mad as hell in office to change things. That’s the opposite of what Clinton was promising, but it’s exactly what Sanders had, to a greater degree even than Trump.

49

What you said is wrong:

Fully 12 percent of people who voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries voted for President Trump in the general election. - SOURCE

Compare that to Clinton supporters who voted for Obama:

The point being Bernie Bros were much more likely to support the liberal candidate than Clintonistas were likely to support the liberal candidate.

50

You can’t say that and get elected President of the United States of America. Not in this era we live in.

ETA: Bernie would go on a rant about the difference between democratic socialism and being a socialist. America’s low information voters would get confused, but they would hear the word Socialism repeated about 10 times.

51

Your cites don’t address what I said, much less prove it wrong.

First, I didn’t say that they would vote for Trump, although 12% did. I said they didn’t vote for Clinton, and more than 12% of Sanders supporters who voted for Trump did stay home or vote third party.

Second, the 2008 election has almost no relevance, if any at all, to the 2016. McCain was a respectable candidate in every way but being a Republican, and if I agreed with conservative policies, I would have been fine voting for him. Trump was no McCain.

A lot happened over those 8 years, and the candidates were entirely different, so you have brought absolutely nothing to back your point here.

That’s also a poll during primary season, not a poll of how people actually voted in the general.

Here’s a hit piece by someone that hates Clinton as much or more than you do, and he says that 15% of Clinton primary voters went for McCain, not the 28% that you have claimed to be a relevant number.

So, with McCain there was only a 3% increase in the number of crossover voters, and McCain was an infinitely better candidate than Trump.

And as far as how that translates into electability:

Exactly, Bernie would be proud of it. But that wouldn’t make the voters any more accepting of it.

52

Well, we know for sure Clinton lost. Her message certainly was not a winner.

I provided numerous citations that suggested Sanders would win versus Trump. Including one by Trump’s own pollster.

We can never know for certain but I am missing your data.

No he wasn’t. McCain had long lost his respectability. This is some weird rose colored glasses view of him. He is certainly light years better than Trump but that is a low bar to cross.

53

You provided the opinions of numerous pundits that suggested that Sanders would win vs Trump.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/23/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-presidential-polls/index.html

All polls, including Trump’s pollsters, showed Clinton winning handily over Trump.

Let me know when you bring data, rather than just opinions of pundits that share your opinion.

I showed the data that debunked your 28% claim. I showed that Clinton would have done even better than Obama against McCain. What are the other claims that you have made that you need me to debunk for you?

Only because he was a Republican. Other than representing Republican policies, what are you saying made him lose his respectability? During the campaign and especially the primary, he certainly tilted to the right a bit more, but that’s what every politician ever has done.

Not really. He was also light years better than Bush, Bush or Reagan. If you just want to say that all Republicans had lost respectability for being Republican, that’s fine, but it’s utterly useless as a metric.

54

He could have defended himself by claiming he showered and applied deodorant twice every day.

55

I think Trump was shocked when he won, and it was clear that he and his team had little plan for a transition. What he wanted was to lose, and then go around whinging about it at big rallies. And frankly, I think that is what Putin wanted, too, because it would have made for a massive domestic issue for Hillary Clinton to cope with while Putin continued playing the master troll. Instead, he ended up with a literal Joker in the White House that he could influence through a combination of flattery and intimidation but couldn’t really control or predict.

Which is the problem you run into when voters feel disenfranchised by both entrenched parties. And they’re not wrong; neither party is doing much to address either the economic nor existential issues that the United States is facing, and when you get down to it there is really very little daylight in actual policies even when the rhetoric is divisive. When the most significant accomplishment of the Obama Administration is passing a health care reform measure that is essentially a copy & past (in broad strokes) from previous Republican proposals, and even then staunchly opposed by Republicans just because it is a Democratic initiative, you are guaranteed deadlock and stalled progress.

I don’t think it was her message so much as the delivery. Clinton’s policies were…mostly fine, and certainly vastly more coherent and detailed than her opponent even when she was hopping between lilypads to try to find the one that voters would get excited about. But relatively few voters thought she was sincere or interested in their problems, and were frankly pretty justified in that view because she followed the DNC mindset of try to appeal to middle-class urban whites as the most likely to swing the vote in apparent obtusity that there was a tectonic shift the issues that voters were facing that were lingering from the 2007-8 crisis perpetrated by many of her corporate backers. Hillary deserves recognition for being a really good politician when it comes to negotiating bipartisan deals and getting legislation through with her name on it (even if she wasn’t the original author or backed it at first) but she is not an appealing candidate to a significant chunk of voters across a wide swath of demographics. I don’t know that any other candidate would have won against Trump, but Hillary seemed destined to shed voters rather than collect them.

Bernie’s not that kind of guy. He’s not your puppet or your “popper”, and he’s not interested in 2%.

Stranger

56

On what data do you base this statement? Because the only data we have on the question is polls of the hypothetical head-to-head matchup between Sanders and Trump. In which Sanders did even better than Clinton, despite everyone knowing that he was a socialist.

57

The OP’s question can only ever be answered with opinion.

I gave you expert opinions including Trump’s own expert on the subject.

58

What people “know” about a candidate in a primary is vastly different than what people “know” about a person following a presidential campaign.

Is it common knowledge that Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union?

Because if he’d been the Democratic candidate for President, every low information voter in America would have heard it a billion times.

What a sample of people who took a poll tell you is just not definitive for me. There is a galaxy’s distance between the Bernie we know and the hypothetical Bernie who was elevated to party nominee.

59

Yet Trump’s “Grab 'em by the pussy” gets a pass? (to mention one thing…we can do more)

Sanders’ has been in politics for ages. I doubt there was much new mud his opponents could find to sling that would stick.

60

I agree with those upthread who mentioned the electorate. ISTM that Trump was such an obviously toxic clown that he possibly couldn’t win, and yet he did.

And though there is disagreement with blaming democratic non-Clinton voters, Clinton did not win, for whatever reason.

There seemed to have been a shortage of pragmatism and realpolitik on the democratic side, and an unexpected and unpredictable surfacing of an extremely vile manifestation of some of the worst that humanity has to offer on the republican side.

Notwithstanding all that, Trump’s toxicity and apparent lack of qualification seemed really obvious to me. To me it was like watching someone in a restaurant having a choice between a plate of chicken fingers or a bowl of diarrhea and, because the chicken fingers were boring and possibly prepared by a corrupt cook, they chose the bowl of diarrhea instead.

The voters caused this IMO and nothing else.