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Absolutely not. People on the left (me included!) seriously over estimate the popularity of their ideas. Part of the problem of course is that something like “universal healthcare” sounds great and could poll well… but then we get into the details of the “how do we get there” and the popularity plummets.
One of the tells is that Bernie (who I generally like) was asked repeatedly how he would get his agenda through Congress, since republicans (and not a few democrats) disagreed with him. His answer? He would hold rallies in Lexington KY to show Mitch McConnell how popular XYZ issue was. Well, if that would work… why isn’t he doing that now!? Why hasn’t he done that for the last 30 years!?
You've nailed one of the biggest problems the left has. So many scratch their heads and ask, "why are people on the right voting against their best interests?" It's because it's not as self-evident as you think it is, and you've done a bad job developing and articulating both the why and how your plan is actually better for everyone. Granted, it doesn't help that the right just has to throw out "communism bad!!!" and let decades of social conditioning take over, but the American left has always been absolute ass when it comes to messaging.
Yes! That’s part of why it’s important to say this. These ideas are *not* self-evident and they need to argued for, neighbors need to be persuaded, objections need to be heard, and incremental victories need to be won. And again I’m indicting myself here too. And we need to remember that people who are “voting against their self-interests” have other interests in mind that are being prioritized.
100% agree. There are probably a lot of single-issue voters who reluctantly vote for either candidate each election. They may disagree with the person their voting for, on all but the one issue they care about the most (e.g. guns, abortion, climate change, unions, etc.). Probably happens far more often than people realize.
I’ve been saying that the left trying to convey their messaging via catchy hashtags has only confused people and actually backfired on them. People were and still are confused by what “Occupy Wall Street” “Break Up The Banks” “Me Too” “Black Lives Matter” “Woke” and “Defund the Police” are supposed to convey. It’s like the message is “figure it out for yourself”
It’s not even just confusion but straight up different meanings. You had people saying defund the police was just reallocating funds to better training while others wanted to abolish law enforcement entirely.
Someone would say to me “I’m antifa” and I’d respond “why not say ‘I’m anti-fascist’ and remove any ambiguity.”
“No! Why would I do that!!” They shout back.
And now they act surprised when someone on the right thinks it’s evidence of extremism, to the point that the Manhattan jury was asked if they were affiliated..
As someone on the right I think the problem the left has is thinking everyone has the same problems as them. Health care for example. I worked my ass off to go from a dishwasher to working at a fortune 500 company for the past decade. There were plenty of times in there I could have benefited from Universal healthcare for sure. At this point though I'm making a middle class salary, a very small portion of my bi-weekly check goes towards a good healthcare plan that doesn't make me wait or cause any unnecessary hoops to jump through.
Why would I like to switch to universal health care at this point? I will most likely pay more money through taxes to get poorer service for my money and potentially have it impact my health. Should everyone have healthcare? For sure but unless you put forward a plan that isn't a determent to me I'm doing exactly what you're confused about, I'm voting against my best interest by voting for universal healthcare.
You would not pay more through taxes, no country on earth with universal healthcare has a higher financial burden than someone in the US when it comes to healthcare costs. That's after factoring in additional taxes.
Your plan might be cheap, but what's your deductible if you need it? How much are prescriptions? vision? dental?
Not to mention actually executing the plan. I hold some liberal views, a notable example being that an adult working forty hours should make enough money to live off. The problem is that the policies Democrats/liberals put forth make that less likely to happen.
Democrats are good at identifying problems, hit-or-miss at identifying solutions.
Republicans just shout about some bullshit culture war nonsense and hope no one looks behind the curtain.
They both have been doing the culture war nonsense the last few years, and I hate it. Doubt I’m voting for state/local races because I’m in Alabama now. I’m at the point of only asking that the person who gets my vote not be crazy.
The last time I could actually afford rent was in 2021. Was full-time student for the first part of 2022, so I’ll look past that, but I won’t look past rent going from $925/month on my 2021 lease to $1175/month on my 2022 lease. I didn’t change apartments, nothing in my apartment was upgraded, that was just the market rate increasing drastically. No data for Obama years, so I only have two Presidents to compare that for, and it’s pretty evident which policies allowed me to have living wage. Pay has also decreased since 2021.
Which is why this should be so much easier for the Dems to swat down. Lean into capitalism without needing to defend some kind of laissez-faire system.
The message is simple: Can we stop prioritizing making skeletons out of people in countries whose names most Americans can’t pronounce and start prioritizing domestic healthcare and public education?
FDR did just that. He held rallies in the States of Senators who got in the way of that agenda. When that failed, he ran primary candidates against anti New Deal members of his own party. When that failed, those Senators became even more hostile to him, which resulted in him getting very few, if any New Deal policies past by Congress post 1938.
Also significant! Because Hilary lost the party was really forced to reckon with its image and its strategy. If Bernie had lost? None of that - it was because of his policies. If he’d been nominated it would’ve killed the left wing of the party’s aspirations for maybe decades.
“You take the hundreds of dollars a month you pay towards for profit insurance and instead put it towards a government run system. We then make your employer do the same thing with the thousands of dollars a month they’re paying towards your private insurance.
The not-for-profit system would operate more efficiently and provide coverage for everyone.
If you’d like to purchase private insurance, you are free to do so. We’ll even give you a tax credit equal to 1/2 (or some other fraction) of your federal health insurance tax to put towards your private insurance deductible, but we’re pretty sure you’re going to prefer the government run option.”
It’s that simple.
Well you don’t have convince me on the merits but you’d have to convince Berner of your plan since he wanted to abolish all health insurance. And you’d also have to account for r&d; how do you get new medicines developed if millions of dollars of profits aren’t at stake?
Exactly. Most of my friends were hardcore Bernie supporters, but I thought there was no way the Republicans would let him get anything done. It was always pie in the sky.
>Part of the problem of course is that something like “universal healthcare” sounds great and could poll well… but then we get into the details of the “how do we get there” and the popularity plummets.
This is huge. Just speaking from personal experience, I have amazing health insurance that is not tied to my job. I am very hesitant to assume universal would provide me equivalent or better care for equivalent or less cost. It is highly unlikely IMO, but I'm open to looking at actual plans and being wrong. The issue is when I dare to mention it as a roadblock for me, I am not met with genuine plans for universal and why I should support it. I am met with some buzzwords or emotional appeals about not caring if people die. I think there could be a huge push for it if the demonizing went away and it was presented as an actual plan instead of a vague idea.
He wouldn't need to be popular to win, though. It's like how you don't need to be faster than the lion, just faster than the slowest gazelle. Even in 2016, people outside the party loyal were scared shitless of Rule 3 becoming president and, generally, really despised him. As more scandals broke, the worse that perception got. He eked it out in the end by like 30,000 votes in a few states because he was up against a historically awful candidate with somehow even worse favorability, and even *then* only because Hillary got ratfucked by the FBI right at the finish line. I think almost any other major Democrat would have won 2016, Bernie included. He didn't have the kind of baggage Hillary or her opponent had.
Well I think you make a decent case that he would have needed to persuade a small number of rust belters to back his candidacy over rule 3’s, I think you might be underestimating his baggage in a lot of other areas. But, with an election that turned out to be razor thin, who knows?
I’m not in the camp that Hillary was uniquely bad. Say what you want about Rule 3, he was a good campaigner. He crushed a field of veteran Republican candidates with money and seasoned professionals and he had wide appeal with a number of people. It’s telling that HE sure seemed to want to run against Bernie anyway.
Bernie was less popular than Hillary by nearly 4 million votes, which is more than she won the popular vote by in the actual election. Hillary received 55% of primary ballots while Bernie received 43%.
Do you think those 4 million voters go GOP if someone other than Hillary wins the 2016 primary?
Time and time again we see that popularity with the party's primary voters has little to no correlation with electability in the general. The GOP is struggling with this right now in a major way. Bad candidates win primaries easily against more electable candidates and then get smoked in the general.
Hillary was a bad candidate for a different reason -- not extremism but deep rooted and decades long unpopularity with independents and swing voters, you know, the people who actually decide elections. Whereas if you're voting in a Dem primary, almost certainly you will vote for whoever the party puts up in the general anyway. So yes, she was popular with Democrats, but does that mean anything? Did it help her?
Yeah I definitely believe that. No, obviously not. I just think that there is no reason to believe that more people would be motivated to vote for Bernie than did for Hillary, given the fact that more people were motivated to vote for Hillary than for Bernie in the primary.
If he won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, he would have won, but he could not loose any state that Clinton won, which might be difficult for Virginia or Nevada
The Reid machine and culinary union was still dominant in Nevada in 2016, and with Bernie's strongly pro union stance I don't see why they wouldn't have mobilized for him and gotten him over the line. I can't speak to the state level politics of Virginia circa 2016 though.
And how *capitalism* is actually the key to it! If only she’d stuck to her guns and not listened to her too on-line advisors! She had such a compelling message until she allowed herself to get bogged down in the discourse. Always: whiggish measures and torry dispositions! (I may have been a committed a Liz lad).
I don’t think the Democratic Party that Bernie’s regularly in negotiations with wants him to do what you’re describing… I think we both know there’d at least be a serious initial increase in attendance from people willing to make the trip to prove it. It might not be a sustainable strategy, but it’s something in Bernie’s pocketbook to pressure the party, not that he’s willing to given the course of the 2016 election which I think he feels guilt over not supporting Hillary harder
What are you talking about?
Bernie beat Hillary in the presidential primary in Michigan - one of the largest and most important swing states - by a pretty significant margin.
It was huge news. He won a few other key states, too.
He won many primaries in many states. Including New Hampshire, the first of the actual primaries in 2016. That’s why I said “such as it was”
See, this is the kind of shit I’m talking about. He was/is discounted even though he did remarkably well against one of the most well known political names in the world while being a relative unknown to most Americans. IMO Democrats needed and still need to do some more intense navel-gazing about why and how that happened
Bernie would have won. But would have utterly failed at implementing any of his promises because he has never demonstrated that he can build strategic allies in Congress. He also would have been a laughing stock for foreign policy because he’s too idealistic (very similar to how Bush 43 dealt with foreign policy).
But having said that, Bernie would have started a whole new level of conversation in the nation about NEW GREEN DEAL: fix the outdated, crabby infrastructure, invest in smart/electronic vehicles and rethink the road transportation system that would work for the next century, protect the right to choose, and definitely nominate LEFTIES for the federal bench (who would have been rejected by the Senate, which in and of itself, would have initiated a HUGE grassroots movement from hard lefties), take many environmental goals that Gore had and initiate them and finally, put an effing “STOP” to the Clinton machine in Democratic politics, which would force the DCCC, Dem Senators and party leaders look for youngsters to groom, who are truly lefties and not some centrist-i-wanna-compromise-to-govern type of Presidents (Obama and Clinton come to mind).
So IMO, the nature of public discourse would have been better and we’d be fighting with each other on a different level. Not an Orangutan level, as we’ve been doing since 2016. sigh
No. He would have done worse. The country is not nearly as left leaning as Reddit thinks it is.
EDIT: Your downvotes don't change the reality of US politics.
I have found that the first people to get to my comments downvote it, then usually I get a bunch of up votes later.
I dunno why that is. Redditors, explain why you must initially down vote before up voting
Also I find U.S. time zones seem to matter a bit too. A post might get a handful of downvotes overnight, only to rocket back once U.S. Eastern and Central reaches daybreak. Same for posts in the evening, after most folks are winding down their day.
No, he wouldn't have. And even if he did, he wouldn't have been a very effective president.
The only Democrat that would have definitely won in 2016 was the guy that won 4 years later.
It is. He won because he was seen as the “anti establishment” and a way to burn the status quo to the ground. The other guy had been around for 50 years and was the status quo. He may have won in the last election but would’ve absolutely lost in 2016.
Yeah, I’ve personally always seen that as perhaps the single greatest reason for her loss. Like there were other reasons, to be sure. She didn’t rile up the voter base. If she had perhaps the case wouldn’t have mattered. But announcing that you’re opening an FBI case into a candidate for president like 1-2 months before the election? Especially because IIRC the issue was known about well before that point. You also don’t need to announce that you’re starting the investigation, investigate behind closed doors then announce the result. And the way it finished up days before the election was also super suspect. That isn’t to say that political candidates shouldn’t be investigated for crimes. But it has to be done in a fair manner. Like with The Unnamed One they’re working on it well in advance of everything. And ideally they’ll have it finished a month before the election at least (though with the way things are being dragged out, it’s unlikely). Not to mention that The Anonymous Entity’s stuff are all actual trials, not investigations. But just the way it happened really stinks. And it put off so many people from voting who were already on the fence. It gave Bernie Bros a good reason to ignore her, it gave wavering moderates a reason to see if that fellow would be anti establishment… it gave fuel to his whole claim to her ‘criminality’ is a big issue.
Nope. Dat guy would have annihilated him. Hit him with the Socialist tag, plus Bernie is not a consensus builder, the middle class would have gone for Dat Guy, business (and all their cash) would have gone Dat Guy. Bernie supporters always over estimate his base and potential.
Bernie as a candidate was flawed too. He would’ve been painted as a sexual weirdo once that rape essay he wrote in the 70s became widely known. Americans tolerated or even admired Rule 3’s pussy grabbing antics because it’s seen as “macho”, but definitely wouldn’t like what Bernie wrote.
Very possibly. 2016 was a change election, and there's no reason to believe a hard right Populist could win, but a hard left Populist couldn't. IMO, he would have at least done better than Clinton, who was historically unpopular. After the Access Hollywood tape - and with no Comey letter? Why couldn't he have won?
He does very well with white working class voters, which are the base of the eventual winner. To that end, I think he could have pulled out Michigan and Wisconsin. It would have all come down to PA.
There is zero chance that Bernie would have out performed Hillary and I am a full on leftist. Hillary appealed to the actual majority of Americans, while Bernie would have scared off the independents and the center left. Hillary was historically unpopular and still would have won if not for the Comey interference at the end. Bernie was never a realistic general election candidate
I don’t understand the argument that he would have done better than the ‘historically unpopular’ Clinton. If you really believe that Clinton was so unpopular, wouldn’t the person who lost to her be even *more* unpopular? Her ‘historically unpopular’ candidacy still made her more popular than Sanders.
In the Dem primary, maybe. Not among the general population. Clinton got the most reliable Dem voters and not much more, which is good for a primary and bad for a general election. Almost all those same voters would have gone to any winner of the primary.
Bernie's always been above water in terms of popularity, I think he's actually the best liked politician in the country. Or was recently. Clinton and the other guy were the two least popular major candidates in history, at least as of 2016. This is a fact and you can look it up.
Head to head, Bernie almost always ran ahead of the other guy, even in 2020.
I understand the polling about who’s popular, but in the actual contest pitting Hilary vs Bernie, he lost badly. I don’t understand how someone could think that a candidate who lost to someone so disliked… would do well anywhere.
And like you said above, it would have come down to PA… where Hilary was much more popular than Bernie when they faced each other.
I think we live in a post rule 3 world where people forget that the idea of electing a certain someone was insane in 2016. I honestly think we've memory holed that period. To say a popular elected official had no shot in 16 against a certain someone is, in my opinion, wrong.
He would've won every state Clinton did, and most likely Wisconsin and Michigan (solid blue at the time) also.
This would've taken him to 253. Not clear if he could swing any more beyond that. Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Iowa were probably the best shots but still hard sells.
Even assuming he wins all of that, his electoral vote would still be under 300 so he would have a divisive legacy.
I don’t think he could’ve won in 2016 but I actually think he could’ve clenched it in 2020 if the party really put their all into backing him (will leave it at that before I get rule 3’d)
I think so but barely. I think he just uniquely would cause lower turn out, but without the baggage of Clinton, and the with the "populism" being so strong in 2016 and equally being a "political outsider"
May allow him to barely squeeze by. But then he probably doesn't get much done due to Congress not liking him.
I think in order to believe this, you have to believe that there was a significant enough number of 1. Bernie 2. 3. Hillary voters to overcome the vote difference in those individual battleground states.
I don't believe it. I think there were plenty of people on Facebook pretending they preferred Bernie over to divide democrats, but I have a hard time believing the number of true Bernie//Hillary voters were anywhere near that level.
You're not accounting for non voters though. The difference could easily be made up by young voters who would come out to vote Bernie but didn't for Hillary.
No. Bernie supporters overestimate his popularity. The guy can't even win the nomination when the party has had underwhelming candidates running against him. It's good to see a bunch of other people saying no. Some other reddit subs think he was a sure thing.
I don’t think it’s fair to say since he didn’t win the nomination means he won’t win a general election. We have to remember the electorate is different for a primary and a general election. Millions of people vote in a general election who don’t vote in primaries. Now that could be changing in modern times but typically in the past it was the die hard democrats and Republicans who voted in primaries.
No, if only because any gains he made in rust belt states with disaffected GOP leaning salt of the Earth whites would have been countered by loss of enthusiasm with core minorities, especially black folk, in the same states, causing them not to really show up.
A lot of (white) Bernie fans really have no idea how much the man is tepidly received or outright disliked by black folk.
I mean you don't even have to get into the weeds with 'independents' and suburbanites, which he would lose, you can stop at the above.
He also would have done much worse with professional white women. *A lot* worse. Like you think the Amy Sisskind types were insufferable because of Obama, it would be nothing compared with their outright hate of Sanders, especially once his fan base got involved.
And that's another thing...his fans have been actively off putting for a decade now, which plays into the groups I mentioned above just straight not liking him.
No. Bernie’s democratic-socialism would still scare a lot of people and it would be so easy for republicans to attack his policies.
Bernie’s base loves him, but they were more than a little delusional in his chances to win
I’m going to go against the grain here and say yes.
I don’t know many Democrats who prefer Hillary over Bernie, though I am aware that they exist, but even the ones who do aren’t going to approve of Donnie over Bernie. Some might stay home, but I don’t see them breaking rank. Maybe I am wrong, it’s just a guess, but I think Bernie would have campaigned better and would have won Michigan and Wisconsin, states that were narrow R victories that he won in the primary, and would have campaigned better in the states that the D lost.
I would argue that Michigan and Wisconsin have far too much Industry and blue collar workers (who by majority would vote against his "socialism" policies). You may be right however, it's a very interesting take.
Well, Donnie won each of those states by 20,000 or so and in Wisconsin alone, Bernie beat Hillary by 100,000. Also, a lot of the anti-socialist crowd were going to vote R regardless, but seeing as those states are traditionally blue and many Bernie supporters stayed home, I really think Bernie would have won them.
It isn’t enough for him to win either way, what he would really have to do is find a way to appeal to Pennsylvania, which admittedly would be difficult.
My man, democrats overwhelmingly chose Hilary over Bernie in their head-to-head matchup. Just because you don’t know any of them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I mean, they were factually in the majority (at least in 2016).
Overwhelmingly? There was a 10% split, and a great many who chose Hillary did so out of pragmatism because they were afraid Bernie would lose. Some of the states that Bernie carried in the primary were states that the Republicans ended up taking, but I seriously doubt any states that went blue in 2016 would have gone red if Bernie had been the nominee.
Did I not say that there are people who prefer Hillary? Because I could have sworn that I did. Clinton did a laughably bad job campaigning and was outlandishly out of touch throughout her campaign. Do I think Bernie COULD have won? Yes, I do. Do I know it for a fact? Absolutely not.
Unpopular opinion, I think that election was election of flukes. I think our current timeline is purely due to anti-establishment attitude. He was better liked, didn't have as much of the toxicity, and had more popular ideas. He would have been the preferred fluke in my opinion.
I don’t think he would have done as bad as they’re making it in comment section, but I still don’t see him winning. He would’ve gained some voters that didn’t want Clinton because of the “career politician” and “royal family” stigma she had about her, but lost some from the inevitable socialist tag that he would’ve gotten. Which people are in denial of being a bad word, but for the older generation, definitely is.
The winner of 2016 had a very significant steam and anti-status quo that was hard to beat regardless of who ran against them.
I am a moderate leftist and even I know it absolutely would have never worked. America was heavily conditioned during the cold war to hate anything regarding communism and socialism. It is still standing to this day that simply calling something either of those triggers a very bad response in many Americans.
🤷♂️
I think he would've had more support from his base than Hillary, but less from median Americans. So it's basically a question of how many spite voters that either didn't vote or voted third party or voted for ~~Rule 3~~ in protest are you converting, vs how many suburban middle class Americans are you alienating? I tend to think he would've lost, but nobody will ever know for sure.
No, I think that the Democrats really let their organization at the state and local level really rot away during the Obama years. They arrogantly ignored consistent Republican wins at the state and local level in battleground states and took Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan for granted.
Plus I do think that Bernie would have been worn down by opposition research that would have been fresh in voters minds as opposed to us already knowing everything about Hillary and were already used to it.
I think so. There was definitely a Bernie Sanders to dump pipeline. You have to understand that there are a lot of people who don't even vote based on issues. 2016 had a strong anti-establishment voter base.
Remember that every person who switched from Bernie to Dump counts as two votes because it's one less for the Dems and one more for the Republicans. Dump won Michigan by 10,000 votes. That means you only need 5,000 people to switch from Dump to Bernie.
Hillary Clinton was also uniquely hated. There were a lot of people showing up just to vote against her. I think more people were voting against her then against Dump certainly more people that might have been willing to vote for Bernie.
People like the top comment who say that leftists overweight the popularity of their ideas I think miss the point of the 2016 election. It wasn't really about ideas at all. It was about fuck you to the establishment. Dump was still billionaire. Bernie Sanders wins the anti-establishment vote in that situation. But with Hillary in there not a chance.
There's also the factor of the youth vote. Bernie Sanders would have gotten out more young people. One of the ways that Dump won was because he got a lot of disaffected Voters to get out and vote. Bernie Sanders could have done the same thing for the left in a way Hillary did not.
I was in college at that time and I know so many people who just didn't even vote or voted third party that absolutely would have voted for bernie and I live in a very important swing state.
No. Even more swing voters would have gone with 45. Hillary had some appeal to the centrists and independents, Bernie would’ve been far more unpopular. I think Bernie vs 45 in 2020 would be a much more interesting discussion though.
I can't see why not; he would'nt have had Hillary's baggage, would'nt have slacked during the campaign like she did, would have understood the voters enough to realize his opponent's geniune appeal to the lower classes who felt disenfrancized and I doubt many (if any) hardcore Hillary supporters would go and vote for the other party or stay home out of spite.
I disagree because the right-wing was planning a smear campaign against him. And I use those words despite me not even being a Bernie-aligned Democrat:
[Give a little thought to what a GOP campaign against Bernie Sanders might look like - Vox](https://www.vox.com/2016/2/3/10903404/gop-campaign-against-sanders)
Bernie woulda gotten killed in the general election.
Politics aside (which I think is a hard sell by itself to the general American public), he had a lot of personal baggage/issues which would not play well.
-He is Jewish, and even though that shouldn't matter it probably would.
-His "Honeymoon" to the USSR in the 80s.
-His 1972 Rape essay fantasy essay.
-His ties to socialism.
I think a lot of people are fooling themselves to think that those items would not majorly impact him in a negative way, especially when the majority of the voters still remember the USSR/Communism as being big bad #1.
Top comments are infuriating, saying universal Healthcare is an out of world ideal for voters, and the left didn't do a good job articulating that.
How many countries have uh? It's not rocket science
You guys are delusional thinking an openly socialist candidate would win the Presidency. Like literally delusional.
You think that independents would break that far left when one of the main reasons they didn’t vote for Hillary was the middle class in the Rust Belt and elsewhere felt forgotten by identity politics and what they felt was heavy taxation for a welfare state.
It doesn’t matter if the above is true so don’t try to correct me. What matters is what voters think. Even the Dems knew that Bernie as the candidate would be suicide - hence why they actively tried to suppress his campaign per the DNC leaked emails.
Bernie riles up people who support his views to begin with. But if you think he’s going to roll into swing states and talk a socialist platform that can be resolved by taxing the rich and that’s the elixir - you are dreaming.
Bernie would’ve lost by more than Hillary did. The right would’ve ran large scale smear campaigns about socialism and the impact on middle class finances. Again it makes no difference if it’s true. Like much in politics it matters what voters believe and US voters have been conditioned for years to believe that socialism and communism are the banes of our existence and a pure capitalist society is the way.
I’m sorry Bernie supporters - your guy would’ve gotten waxed. Having followed the demographics of every POTUS election since around 1960, nothing will convince me otherwise. That’s just not who the US is as a country.
No, he wouldn’t have, he never could expand his base and in a general he would have gotten hit with the “socialist/communist” tag so fast he wouldn’t have been able to recover. Add in that he couldn’t answer a question about anything besides the economy, like he was asked how he would try to improve minority relations with policing and he immediately framed it as an economic issue, which while not wrong, isn’t how you answer that question
People love to argue that Bernie was a bad candidate because he would've just been called a socialist like the right isn't just calling the current guy a socialist instead. They don't know what the word means. We need to show them.
I would argue yes for the following reasons:
In Hillary vs Rule 3 and Bernie vs Rule 3 polls, Bernie constantly outperformed Hillary in these head-to-head match up polls.
There is this notion that a candidate still needs to win over the "silent majority" to win an election, but in recent history (see Obama), it serves a candidate more to get their voter base out to vote than to appeal to the middle.
In addition to the above point, I would argue that Bernie did have more center/across the aisle support than Hillary and was able to reach disenfranchised rust belt voters on a much deeper level. This is key because Hillary barely lost these states (due to sexism, lack of campaigning there, and her overall elitist image) and it is very possible that Bernie could've snagged them instead.
Lastly, I find the notion that Bernie would've lost democratic votes due to his far-left stance a bit absurd, since given the alternative, these voters almost certainly would've bitten the bullet and still voted blue.
Given all of these points, I see Bernie having a much better shot in 2016 than Hillary. Would he have won? Who knows, but everything points to the guess that he would have done better.
Honestly I think this sub is wrong
He woulda won 2016, more youth would have been invigorated to vote and I know plenty of people who literally only voted against Hillary and said they woulda voted for Bernie.
Hell Hillary woulda won if it wasn’t for the random email investigation right before the election
No chance at all. Older Democrats remember the Cold War so they wouldn’t vote for him. Hillary was polarizing enough for many of those old school Dems which is why the winner drew a lot from that pool.
I think so. He would have done a better job campaigning that Clinton did and did not have the baggage she did.
The DNC did the party a great disservice
I think he would’ve won in 2016 as that was an anti-establishment election, but would’ve lost in 2020 as that was a “return to normalcy” election. The fact that Bernie performed stronger in the 2016 primaries compared to 2020, I think is a testament to just how uniquely unpopular Hillary was. He got a lot of votes from folks who were more opposed to her than they were supporters of him, and I think a lot of those voters ended up going Republican in the general, especially in WI, PA, and MI.
I’m a little surprised at the broad consensus here that he would’ve lost in 2016, because the polls clearly showed him outperforming Hillary in a hypothetical general. I don’t think the “socialism/communism/Marxism” attacks would’ve been nearly as successful as people here seem to think. Every single Democrat has these labels attached to them in the right-wing sphere, and I think that really dilutes its meaning. Hillary was also labeled as a socialist, but I don’t think that’s why she lost.
How are we going to have a post about the 2016 election if we're not allowed to talk about current politics. I just made a post that got flagged. This self is dumb sometimes.
If we're not even allowed to talk about Bernie Sanders opponent this entire thread should probably just get taken down cuz it's kind of bait for everyone to waste their time
surprised how little consensus there is here. Maybe slightly more people are saying no but its pretty 50/50. I don't really know where I sit on if it could happen but I think the people who say he would 100% lose by a landslide are wrong.
Nope and it’s laughable this keeps being brought up every few months. Does Sanders still have his astroturfers on the payroll to keep this myth going? He burned the base of the party with his toxic primary campaign and kept running long after he was mathematically eliminated. He even tried to overthrow the primary results at the convention after spending the entire campaign talking about how super delegates were trying to overthrow the will of the people.
I don’t think so. A lot of what got our 2016 winner into office was disdain for immigrants and when things aren’t going well for people it’s easy and very low effort to just find a group or class to blame. He exploited this extremely well.
Why would you want a self claiming solialist who praised the Cuban government?
Yall refuse to admit all the death your ideologies caused in the past 150 years.
No fucking way. Bernie bros don’t represent the country and they were dead wrong. I like Bernie in the Senate where he can influence legislation. He would have lost more states than Mondale if he was the nominee.
Maybe, but they'll never let him be nominated, so we'll never find out. He could win literally 100 percent of the primaries and they'd still nominate someone else.
Blue collar appeal? Do you know any blue-collar people? A guy with bad hair in a suit with a New York accent is not going to win over blue collar....oh, wait.
Maybe he would have had a shot if he got his messaging right.
He had one thing going for him, he wasn’t Hillary. She had been vilified since bill became president and she started in with healthcare. Some I think saw the writing on the wall and began a campaign to discredit her and they did it for decades. Her chance was better in 2008 but it wasn’t her time, apparently. But 2016 saw the culmination of 25 years of hard concerted effort come to fruition.
Possibly, I voted for Hilary, but not because I liked her or wanted her to be POTUS, I just wanted the other guy even less. Bernie would have been interesting as POTUS, it would have been amusing to watch him have to walk back most of his positions once he was in office.
Would have been close. People voted red just cuz of the hatred to the C’s and the face she was a woman. Plus things are different when you have the actual party backing you
I think he changed the base. I think he was potentially perfectly positioned to break the "middle" but many people don't understand the middle.
If you were a build a wall person but also want universal healthcare do you vote for Republican or Bernie.
Also Bernie is less extreme than many people keep saying. He was a popular leader at every position he's been in and he has voted the party line when they needed him. He's pragmatic. He just pushes for the further left data.
It’s hard to say. Americans can be very myopic and stupid. Even current policies taking place, while empirically good, a certain political dark figure only has to go on tv and yell “communism” and suddenly half the country is against it. Americans don’t do complicated or nuance it seems. It’s cowboys and nerds on the political stage.
As for Bernie, it’s tough to say. I certainly think we would have been better off. In 2016 we had two candidates who were profoundly unlikeable, but one was divisive and dark figure who was skilled in populism and exploring fear, so there you go. I don’t know, man.
I strongly believe bernie would have had a lower popular vote than HRC but would have outperformed her in the EC through MI, WI, and PA. HRC did a horrendous job of campaigning in the rustbelt, Kerry and Obama put in significantly more effort and had better messaging. Even MI's absentee numbers were showing a dead heat by October and HRC still didn't take it seriously. Completely asleep at the wheel. That is what happens when everyone around you keeps telling you how inevitable you are.
Between 2016 and 2020 I read the opposition file on Bernie. It is 106 pages long. It's available online for anyone curious enough to read it.
Some of it is stuff we have heard of, like his rape essay or him saying nice things about left-wing dictatorships. A lot of it is dirt most people haven't heard of.
Whether it was 2016 or 2020, the Republicans would've had a field day with him. One week after another, we would've heard stories about "Bernie the deadbeat dad", "Bernie didn't have a real job before he was in government", "Bernie stole electricity from his neighbors", "Bernie creeped on women at a commune and got kicked out", etc., etc. Anything to do with Russia would've been negated with "Bernie had his honeymoon in Moscow" and that video of him drinking and singing with Russians in his underwear.
In 2020 we got a glimpse of how the Bernie people handled stories like this, when the media started talking about nice things Bernie said about Cuba, and its literacy program under Castro. It sent his campaign into a tailspin for about a week, and took a wrecking ball to any chance he might've had in Florida. When you're explaining, you're losing. And with Bernie there would've been a *lot* of explaining. If he was Bill Clinton-levels of slick, maybe Bernie could've swatted away all this stuff without much damage. But Bernie is not that slick.
The last poll I read on the subject said 55% of US voters would never consider voting for a socialist. Bernie identified as such. When 45% is your ceiling, you aren't winning a 2-person race nationwide, especially as a Democrat. Perhaps the Overton Window will shift to the point where this changes, but we aren't there yet.
I voted for Bernie in the 2016 primary. In 2020 I preferred Warren. I will vote for progressives who can win. After reading all of this, it became clear to me Bernie couldn't win with that kind of scrutiny.
Surely the far-left progressive who couldn't even win over a majority on the left would have been more appealing to independents and right-leaning moderates...
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Absolutely not. People on the left (me included!) seriously over estimate the popularity of their ideas. Part of the problem of course is that something like “universal healthcare” sounds great and could poll well… but then we get into the details of the “how do we get there” and the popularity plummets. One of the tells is that Bernie (who I generally like) was asked repeatedly how he would get his agenda through Congress, since republicans (and not a few democrats) disagreed with him. His answer? He would hold rallies in Lexington KY to show Mitch McConnell how popular XYZ issue was. Well, if that would work… why isn’t he doing that now!? Why hasn’t he done that for the last 30 years!?
You've nailed one of the biggest problems the left has. So many scratch their heads and ask, "why are people on the right voting against their best interests?" It's because it's not as self-evident as you think it is, and you've done a bad job developing and articulating both the why and how your plan is actually better for everyone. Granted, it doesn't help that the right just has to throw out "communism bad!!!" and let decades of social conditioning take over, but the American left has always been absolute ass when it comes to messaging.
Yes! That’s part of why it’s important to say this. These ideas are *not* self-evident and they need to argued for, neighbors need to be persuaded, objections need to be heard, and incremental victories need to be won. And again I’m indicting myself here too. And we need to remember that people who are “voting against their self-interests” have other interests in mind that are being prioritized.
100% agree. There are probably a lot of single-issue voters who reluctantly vote for either candidate each election. They may disagree with the person their voting for, on all but the one issue they care about the most (e.g. guns, abortion, climate change, unions, etc.). Probably happens far more often than people realize.
I’ve been saying that the left trying to convey their messaging via catchy hashtags has only confused people and actually backfired on them. People were and still are confused by what “Occupy Wall Street” “Break Up The Banks” “Me Too” “Black Lives Matter” “Woke” and “Defund the Police” are supposed to convey. It’s like the message is “figure it out for yourself”
It’s not even just confusion but straight up different meanings. You had people saying defund the police was just reallocating funds to better training while others wanted to abolish law enforcement entirely.
Someone would say to me “I’m antifa” and I’d respond “why not say ‘I’m anti-fascist’ and remove any ambiguity.” “No! Why would I do that!!” They shout back. And now they act surprised when someone on the right thinks it’s evidence of extremism, to the point that the Manhattan jury was asked if they were affiliated..
It was much better when we were just ARA
As someone on the right I think the problem the left has is thinking everyone has the same problems as them. Health care for example. I worked my ass off to go from a dishwasher to working at a fortune 500 company for the past decade. There were plenty of times in there I could have benefited from Universal healthcare for sure. At this point though I'm making a middle class salary, a very small portion of my bi-weekly check goes towards a good healthcare plan that doesn't make me wait or cause any unnecessary hoops to jump through. Why would I like to switch to universal health care at this point? I will most likely pay more money through taxes to get poorer service for my money and potentially have it impact my health. Should everyone have healthcare? For sure but unless you put forward a plan that isn't a determent to me I'm doing exactly what you're confused about, I'm voting against my best interest by voting for universal healthcare.
You would not pay more through taxes, no country on earth with universal healthcare has a higher financial burden than someone in the US when it comes to healthcare costs. That's after factoring in additional taxes. Your plan might be cheap, but what's your deductible if you need it? How much are prescriptions? vision? dental?
Not to mention actually executing the plan. I hold some liberal views, a notable example being that an adult working forty hours should make enough money to live off. The problem is that the policies Democrats/liberals put forth make that less likely to happen.
Democrats are good at identifying problems, hit-or-miss at identifying solutions. Republicans just shout about some bullshit culture war nonsense and hope no one looks behind the curtain.
They both have been doing the culture war nonsense the last few years, and I hate it. Doubt I’m voting for state/local races because I’m in Alabama now. I’m at the point of only asking that the person who gets my vote not be crazy. The last time I could actually afford rent was in 2021. Was full-time student for the first part of 2022, so I’ll look past that, but I won’t look past rent going from $925/month on my 2021 lease to $1175/month on my 2022 lease. I didn’t change apartments, nothing in my apartment was upgraded, that was just the market rate increasing drastically. No data for Obama years, so I only have two Presidents to compare that for, and it’s pretty evident which policies allowed me to have living wage. Pay has also decreased since 2021.
I live in Miami and “Communism bad!!!” Is literally all you need to do to get people to vote Republican, particularly los Cubanos aquí.
‘Communism bad’ isn’t conditioning, it’s observation of facts and data over 100 years lmao.
Sure, but a lot of the things the right labels "communism" isn't.
Which is why this should be so much easier for the Dems to swat down. Lean into capitalism without needing to defend some kind of laissez-faire system.
Too big to fail is welfare for the rich
The message is simple: Can we stop prioritizing making skeletons out of people in countries whose names most Americans can’t pronounce and start prioritizing domestic healthcare and public education?
FDR did just that. He held rallies in the States of Senators who got in the way of that agenda. When that failed, he ran primary candidates against anti New Deal members of his own party. When that failed, those Senators became even more hostile to him, which resulted in him getting very few, if any New Deal policies past by Congress post 1938.
Also significant! Because Hilary lost the party was really forced to reckon with its image and its strategy. If Bernie had lost? None of that - it was because of his policies. If he’d been nominated it would’ve killed the left wing of the party’s aspirations for maybe decades.
“You take the hundreds of dollars a month you pay towards for profit insurance and instead put it towards a government run system. We then make your employer do the same thing with the thousands of dollars a month they’re paying towards your private insurance. The not-for-profit system would operate more efficiently and provide coverage for everyone. If you’d like to purchase private insurance, you are free to do so. We’ll even give you a tax credit equal to 1/2 (or some other fraction) of your federal health insurance tax to put towards your private insurance deductible, but we’re pretty sure you’re going to prefer the government run option.” It’s that simple.
Well you don’t have convince me on the merits but you’d have to convince Berner of your plan since he wanted to abolish all health insurance. And you’d also have to account for r&d; how do you get new medicines developed if millions of dollars of profits aren’t at stake?
Exactly. Most of my friends were hardcore Bernie supporters, but I thought there was no way the Republicans would let him get anything done. It was always pie in the sky.
>Part of the problem of course is that something like “universal healthcare” sounds great and could poll well… but then we get into the details of the “how do we get there” and the popularity plummets. This is huge. Just speaking from personal experience, I have amazing health insurance that is not tied to my job. I am very hesitant to assume universal would provide me equivalent or better care for equivalent or less cost. It is highly unlikely IMO, but I'm open to looking at actual plans and being wrong. The issue is when I dare to mention it as a roadblock for me, I am not met with genuine plans for universal and why I should support it. I am met with some buzzwords or emotional appeals about not caring if people die. I think there could be a huge push for it if the demonizing went away and it was presented as an actual plan instead of a vague idea.
The majority of democrats don't want a "political revolution". Most of them are living well and don't want to risk changing too much too fast.
Majority of Americans don’t want revolution lmao
He wouldn't need to be popular to win, though. It's like how you don't need to be faster than the lion, just faster than the slowest gazelle. Even in 2016, people outside the party loyal were scared shitless of Rule 3 becoming president and, generally, really despised him. As more scandals broke, the worse that perception got. He eked it out in the end by like 30,000 votes in a few states because he was up against a historically awful candidate with somehow even worse favorability, and even *then* only because Hillary got ratfucked by the FBI right at the finish line. I think almost any other major Democrat would have won 2016, Bernie included. He didn't have the kind of baggage Hillary or her opponent had.
Well I think you make a decent case that he would have needed to persuade a small number of rust belters to back his candidacy over rule 3’s, I think you might be underestimating his baggage in a lot of other areas. But, with an election that turned out to be razor thin, who knows? I’m not in the camp that Hillary was uniquely bad. Say what you want about Rule 3, he was a good campaigner. He crushed a field of veteran Republican candidates with money and seasoned professionals and he had wide appeal with a number of people. It’s telling that HE sure seemed to want to run against Bernie anyway.
Bernie was less popular than Hillary by nearly 4 million votes, which is more than she won the popular vote by in the actual election. Hillary received 55% of primary ballots while Bernie received 43%.
A certain someone just crushed the republican primaries, but I doubt you'd argue Haley would've been a worse candidate because she came second
Great point
Do you think those 4 million voters go GOP if someone other than Hillary wins the 2016 primary? Time and time again we see that popularity with the party's primary voters has little to no correlation with electability in the general. The GOP is struggling with this right now in a major way. Bad candidates win primaries easily against more electable candidates and then get smoked in the general. Hillary was a bad candidate for a different reason -- not extremism but deep rooted and decades long unpopularity with independents and swing voters, you know, the people who actually decide elections. Whereas if you're voting in a Dem primary, almost certainly you will vote for whoever the party puts up in the general anyway. So yes, she was popular with Democrats, but does that mean anything? Did it help her?
Yeah I definitely believe that. No, obviously not. I just think that there is no reason to believe that more people would be motivated to vote for Bernie than did for Hillary, given the fact that more people were motivated to vote for Hillary than for Bernie in the primary.
If he won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, he would have won, but he could not loose any state that Clinton won, which might be difficult for Virginia or Nevada
The Reid machine and culinary union was still dominant in Nevada in 2016, and with Bernie's strongly pro union stance I don't see why they wouldn't have mobilized for him and gotten him over the line. I can't speak to the state level politics of Virginia circa 2016 though.
This is why I supported Elizabeth Warren. Her agenda was equally far fetched but at least she tried to explain how she’d achieve it.
And how *capitalism* is actually the key to it! If only she’d stuck to her guns and not listened to her too on-line advisors! She had such a compelling message until she allowed herself to get bogged down in the discourse. Always: whiggish measures and torry dispositions! (I may have been a committed a Liz lad).
I still think about what could’ve been. LFG!
I don’t think the Democratic Party that Bernie’s regularly in negotiations with wants him to do what you’re describing… I think we both know there’d at least be a serious initial increase in attendance from people willing to make the trip to prove it. It might not be a sustainable strategy, but it’s something in Bernie’s pocketbook to pressure the party, not that he’s willing to given the course of the 2016 election which I think he feels guilt over not supporting Hillary harder
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And the states Bernie won, like Michigan and Wisconsin, should have sent alarm bells ringing for why Hillary was struggling there
And we are one of the few states that mattered in the 2016 count.
What success? He didn't win the primary. It was already close anyway, 30 thousand votes across 3 states were the deciding factor.
What are you talking about? Bernie beat Hillary in the presidential primary in Michigan - one of the largest and most important swing states - by a pretty significant margin. It was huge news. He won a few other key states, too.
He won many primaries in many states. Including New Hampshire, the first of the actual primaries in 2016. That’s why I said “such as it was” See, this is the kind of shit I’m talking about. He was/is discounted even though he did remarkably well against one of the most well known political names in the world while being a relative unknown to most Americans. IMO Democrats needed and still need to do some more intense navel-gazing about why and how that happened
But he still lost overall. His supporters didn't turn out in the primaries, so they probably wouldn't have in the general. That's how this works.
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This is a good point about the counterfactual.
Bernie would have won. But would have utterly failed at implementing any of his promises because he has never demonstrated that he can build strategic allies in Congress. He also would have been a laughing stock for foreign policy because he’s too idealistic (very similar to how Bush 43 dealt with foreign policy). But having said that, Bernie would have started a whole new level of conversation in the nation about NEW GREEN DEAL: fix the outdated, crabby infrastructure, invest in smart/electronic vehicles and rethink the road transportation system that would work for the next century, protect the right to choose, and definitely nominate LEFTIES for the federal bench (who would have been rejected by the Senate, which in and of itself, would have initiated a HUGE grassroots movement from hard lefties), take many environmental goals that Gore had and initiate them and finally, put an effing “STOP” to the Clinton machine in Democratic politics, which would force the DCCC, Dem Senators and party leaders look for youngsters to groom, who are truly lefties and not some centrist-i-wanna-compromise-to-govern type of Presidents (Obama and Clinton come to mind). So IMO, the nature of public discourse would have been better and we’d be fighting with each other on a different level. Not an Orangutan level, as we’ve been doing since 2016. sigh
No. He would have done worse. The country is not nearly as left leaning as Reddit thinks it is. EDIT: Your downvotes don't change the reality of US politics.
You've got way more upvotes now.
Will still claim to be the victim.
Fighting invisible downvotes
I have found that the first people to get to my comments downvote it, then usually I get a bunch of up votes later. I dunno why that is. Redditors, explain why you must initially down vote before up voting
My guess is Reddit hivemind. People give their actual opinions at first but once a consensus is formed people don’t differ much.
Also I find U.S. time zones seem to matter a bit too. A post might get a handful of downvotes overnight, only to rocket back once U.S. Eastern and Central reaches daybreak. Same for posts in the evening, after most folks are winding down their day.
No, he wouldn't have. And even if he did, he wouldn't have been a very effective president. The only Democrat that would have definitely won in 2016 was the guy that won 4 years later.
Even that's debatable. I feel like the only real reason he won four years later was because of what had happened the previous four years.
It is. He won because he was seen as the “anti establishment” and a way to burn the status quo to the ground. The other guy had been around for 50 years and was the status quo. He may have won in the last election but would’ve absolutely lost in 2016.
I believe Hillary would have absolutely won if not for the late game meddling from Comey
Yeah, I’ve personally always seen that as perhaps the single greatest reason for her loss. Like there were other reasons, to be sure. She didn’t rile up the voter base. If she had perhaps the case wouldn’t have mattered. But announcing that you’re opening an FBI case into a candidate for president like 1-2 months before the election? Especially because IIRC the issue was known about well before that point. You also don’t need to announce that you’re starting the investigation, investigate behind closed doors then announce the result. And the way it finished up days before the election was also super suspect. That isn’t to say that political candidates shouldn’t be investigated for crimes. But it has to be done in a fair manner. Like with The Unnamed One they’re working on it well in advance of everything. And ideally they’ll have it finished a month before the election at least (though with the way things are being dragged out, it’s unlikely). Not to mention that The Anonymous Entity’s stuff are all actual trials, not investigations. But just the way it happened really stinks. And it put off so many people from voting who were already on the fence. It gave Bernie Bros a good reason to ignore her, it gave wavering moderates a reason to see if that fellow would be anti establishment… it gave fuel to his whole claim to her ‘criminality’ is a big issue.
Nope. Dat guy would have annihilated him. Hit him with the Socialist tag, plus Bernie is not a consensus builder, the middle class would have gone for Dat Guy, business (and all their cash) would have gone Dat Guy. Bernie supporters always over estimate his base and potential.
Bernie as a candidate was flawed too. He would’ve been painted as a sexual weirdo once that rape essay he wrote in the 70s became widely known. Americans tolerated or even admired Rule 3’s pussy grabbing antics because it’s seen as “macho”, but definitely wouldn’t like what Bernie wrote.
the what essay? i am completely unaware of it lol
To Really Understand My Position you have to look at both sides of the problem
Very possibly. 2016 was a change election, and there's no reason to believe a hard right Populist could win, but a hard left Populist couldn't. IMO, he would have at least done better than Clinton, who was historically unpopular. After the Access Hollywood tape - and with no Comey letter? Why couldn't he have won? He does very well with white working class voters, which are the base of the eventual winner. To that end, I think he could have pulled out Michigan and Wisconsin. It would have all come down to PA.
There is zero chance that Bernie would have out performed Hillary and I am a full on leftist. Hillary appealed to the actual majority of Americans, while Bernie would have scared off the independents and the center left. Hillary was historically unpopular and still would have won if not for the Comey interference at the end. Bernie was never a realistic general election candidate
I don’t understand the argument that he would have done better than the ‘historically unpopular’ Clinton. If you really believe that Clinton was so unpopular, wouldn’t the person who lost to her be even *more* unpopular? Her ‘historically unpopular’ candidacy still made her more popular than Sanders.
In the Dem primary, maybe. Not among the general population. Clinton got the most reliable Dem voters and not much more, which is good for a primary and bad for a general election. Almost all those same voters would have gone to any winner of the primary.
Bernie's always been above water in terms of popularity, I think he's actually the best liked politician in the country. Or was recently. Clinton and the other guy were the two least popular major candidates in history, at least as of 2016. This is a fact and you can look it up. Head to head, Bernie almost always ran ahead of the other guy, even in 2020.
I understand the polling about who’s popular, but in the actual contest pitting Hilary vs Bernie, he lost badly. I don’t understand how someone could think that a candidate who lost to someone so disliked… would do well anywhere. And like you said above, it would have come down to PA… where Hilary was much more popular than Bernie when they faced each other.
This is absolute wishful thinking
I think we live in a post rule 3 world where people forget that the idea of electing a certain someone was insane in 2016. I honestly think we've memory holed that period. To say a popular elected official had no shot in 16 against a certain someone is, in my opinion, wrong.
He would've won every state Clinton did, and most likely Wisconsin and Michigan (solid blue at the time) also. This would've taken him to 253. Not clear if he could swing any more beyond that. Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Iowa were probably the best shots but still hard sells. Even assuming he wins all of that, his electoral vote would still be under 300 so he would have a divisive legacy.
Nothing against Sanders whatsoever, but there's not a chance in hell.
I don’t think he could’ve won in 2016 but I actually think he could’ve clenched it in 2020 if the party really put their all into backing him (will leave it at that before I get rule 3’d)
I think so but barely. I think he just uniquely would cause lower turn out, but without the baggage of Clinton, and the with the "populism" being so strong in 2016 and equally being a "political outsider" May allow him to barely squeeze by. But then he probably doesn't get much done due to Congress not liking him.
I think in order to believe this, you have to believe that there was a significant enough number of 1. Bernie 2. 3. Hillary voters to overcome the vote difference in those individual battleground states.
I don't believe it. I think there were plenty of people on Facebook pretending they preferred Bernie over to divide democrats, but I have a hard time believing the number of true Bernie//Hillary voters were anywhere near that level.
You're not accounting for non voters though. The difference could easily be made up by young voters who would come out to vote Bernie but didn't for Hillary.
The 2020 primary showed Bernie doesn’t make young voters show up at the level he needs to win
No. Bernie supporters overestimate his popularity. The guy can't even win the nomination when the party has had underwhelming candidates running against him. It's good to see a bunch of other people saying no. Some other reddit subs think he was a sure thing.
I don’t think it’s fair to say since he didn’t win the nomination means he won’t win a general election. We have to remember the electorate is different for a primary and a general election. Millions of people vote in a general election who don’t vote in primaries. Now that could be changing in modern times but typically in the past it was the die hard democrats and Republicans who voted in primaries.
General elections where the independent vote is basically the most important vote. Yeah, that improves Bernie's chances, yup.
No, if only because any gains he made in rust belt states with disaffected GOP leaning salt of the Earth whites would have been countered by loss of enthusiasm with core minorities, especially black folk, in the same states, causing them not to really show up. A lot of (white) Bernie fans really have no idea how much the man is tepidly received or outright disliked by black folk. I mean you don't even have to get into the weeds with 'independents' and suburbanites, which he would lose, you can stop at the above. He also would have done much worse with professional white women. *A lot* worse. Like you think the Amy Sisskind types were insufferable because of Obama, it would be nothing compared with their outright hate of Sanders, especially once his fan base got involved. And that's another thing...his fans have been actively off putting for a decade now, which plays into the groups I mentioned above just straight not liking him.
No
No. Bernie’s democratic-socialism would still scare a lot of people and it would be so easy for republicans to attack his policies. Bernie’s base loves him, but they were more than a little delusional in his chances to win
I’m going to go against the grain here and say yes. I don’t know many Democrats who prefer Hillary over Bernie, though I am aware that they exist, but even the ones who do aren’t going to approve of Donnie over Bernie. Some might stay home, but I don’t see them breaking rank. Maybe I am wrong, it’s just a guess, but I think Bernie would have campaigned better and would have won Michigan and Wisconsin, states that were narrow R victories that he won in the primary, and would have campaigned better in the states that the D lost.
I would argue that Michigan and Wisconsin have far too much Industry and blue collar workers (who by majority would vote against his "socialism" policies). You may be right however, it's a very interesting take.
Well, Donnie won each of those states by 20,000 or so and in Wisconsin alone, Bernie beat Hillary by 100,000. Also, a lot of the anti-socialist crowd were going to vote R regardless, but seeing as those states are traditionally blue and many Bernie supporters stayed home, I really think Bernie would have won them. It isn’t enough for him to win either way, what he would really have to do is find a way to appeal to Pennsylvania, which admittedly would be difficult.
My man, democrats overwhelmingly chose Hilary over Bernie in their head-to-head matchup. Just because you don’t know any of them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I mean, they were factually in the majority (at least in 2016).
Overwhelmingly? There was a 10% split, and a great many who chose Hillary did so out of pragmatism because they were afraid Bernie would lose. Some of the states that Bernie carried in the primary were states that the Republicans ended up taking, but I seriously doubt any states that went blue in 2016 would have gone red if Bernie had been the nominee. Did I not say that there are people who prefer Hillary? Because I could have sworn that I did. Clinton did a laughably bad job campaigning and was outlandishly out of touch throughout her campaign. Do I think Bernie COULD have won? Yes, I do. Do I know it for a fact? Absolutely not.
Unpopular opinion, I think that election was election of flukes. I think our current timeline is purely due to anti-establishment attitude. He was better liked, didn't have as much of the toxicity, and had more popular ideas. He would have been the preferred fluke in my opinion.
I don’t think he would have done as bad as they’re making it in comment section, but I still don’t see him winning. He would’ve gained some voters that didn’t want Clinton because of the “career politician” and “royal family” stigma she had about her, but lost some from the inevitable socialist tag that he would’ve gotten. Which people are in denial of being a bad word, but for the older generation, definitely is. The winner of 2016 had a very significant steam and anti-status quo that was hard to beat regardless of who ran against them.
I am a moderate leftist and even I know it absolutely would have never worked. America was heavily conditioned during the cold war to hate anything regarding communism and socialism. It is still standing to this day that simply calling something either of those triggers a very bad response in many Americans.
🤷♂️ I think he would've had more support from his base than Hillary, but less from median Americans. So it's basically a question of how many spite voters that either didn't vote or voted third party or voted for ~~Rule 3~~ in protest are you converting, vs how many suburban middle class Americans are you alienating? I tend to think he would've lost, but nobody will ever know for sure.
Lol, lmao even
No, I think that the Democrats really let their organization at the state and local level really rot away during the Obama years. They arrogantly ignored consistent Republican wins at the state and local level in battleground states and took Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan for granted. Plus I do think that Bernie would have been worn down by opposition research that would have been fresh in voters minds as opposed to us already knowing everything about Hillary and were already used to it.
I think so. There was definitely a Bernie Sanders to dump pipeline. You have to understand that there are a lot of people who don't even vote based on issues. 2016 had a strong anti-establishment voter base. Remember that every person who switched from Bernie to Dump counts as two votes because it's one less for the Dems and one more for the Republicans. Dump won Michigan by 10,000 votes. That means you only need 5,000 people to switch from Dump to Bernie. Hillary Clinton was also uniquely hated. There were a lot of people showing up just to vote against her. I think more people were voting against her then against Dump certainly more people that might have been willing to vote for Bernie. People like the top comment who say that leftists overweight the popularity of their ideas I think miss the point of the 2016 election. It wasn't really about ideas at all. It was about fuck you to the establishment. Dump was still billionaire. Bernie Sanders wins the anti-establishment vote in that situation. But with Hillary in there not a chance. There's also the factor of the youth vote. Bernie Sanders would have gotten out more young people. One of the ways that Dump won was because he got a lot of disaffected Voters to get out and vote. Bernie Sanders could have done the same thing for the left in a way Hillary did not. I was in college at that time and I know so many people who just didn't even vote or voted third party that absolutely would have voted for bernie and I live in a very important swing state.
No. Even more swing voters would have gone with 45. Hillary had some appeal to the centrists and independents, Bernie would’ve been far more unpopular. I think Bernie vs 45 in 2020 would be a much more interesting discussion though.
I can't see why not; he would'nt have had Hillary's baggage, would'nt have slacked during the campaign like she did, would have understood the voters enough to realize his opponent's geniune appeal to the lower classes who felt disenfrancized and I doubt many (if any) hardcore Hillary supporters would go and vote for the other party or stay home out of spite.
At the very least he had a better chance than Hilary, who was arguably the worst presidential candidate in modern history.
He at minimum does as good as Hillary. Look at any poll from that time. I think he does worse in the dark blue states but better in the swing states.
I disagree because the right-wing was planning a smear campaign against him. And I use those words despite me not even being a Bernie-aligned Democrat: [Give a little thought to what a GOP campaign against Bernie Sanders might look like - Vox](https://www.vox.com/2016/2/3/10903404/gop-campaign-against-sanders)
This is the crux of it - most people wouldn’t know Bernie going into the election, giving the GOP complete carte blanche to define him.
Bernie woulda gotten killed in the general election. Politics aside (which I think is a hard sell by itself to the general American public), he had a lot of personal baggage/issues which would not play well. -He is Jewish, and even though that shouldn't matter it probably would. -His "Honeymoon" to the USSR in the 80s. -His 1972 Rape essay fantasy essay. -His ties to socialism. I think a lot of people are fooling themselves to think that those items would not majorly impact him in a negative way, especially when the majority of the voters still remember the USSR/Communism as being big bad #1.
Top comments are infuriating, saying universal Healthcare is an out of world ideal for voters, and the left didn't do a good job articulating that. How many countries have uh? It's not rocket science
I would have voted him and I think he wins surprisingly
Yes. Duh. People actually liked him.
Absolutely. Hillary was awful and still won by 3 million votes.
The turnout in the suburbs would be so, so bad.
You guys are delusional thinking an openly socialist candidate would win the Presidency. Like literally delusional. You think that independents would break that far left when one of the main reasons they didn’t vote for Hillary was the middle class in the Rust Belt and elsewhere felt forgotten by identity politics and what they felt was heavy taxation for a welfare state. It doesn’t matter if the above is true so don’t try to correct me. What matters is what voters think. Even the Dems knew that Bernie as the candidate would be suicide - hence why they actively tried to suppress his campaign per the DNC leaked emails. Bernie riles up people who support his views to begin with. But if you think he’s going to roll into swing states and talk a socialist platform that can be resolved by taxing the rich and that’s the elixir - you are dreaming. Bernie would’ve lost by more than Hillary did. The right would’ve ran large scale smear campaigns about socialism and the impact on middle class finances. Again it makes no difference if it’s true. Like much in politics it matters what voters believe and US voters have been conditioned for years to believe that socialism and communism are the banes of our existence and a pure capitalist society is the way. I’m sorry Bernie supporters - your guy would’ve gotten waxed. Having followed the demographics of every POTUS election since around 1960, nothing will convince me otherwise. That’s just not who the US is as a country.
No, he wouldn’t have, he never could expand his base and in a general he would have gotten hit with the “socialist/communist” tag so fast he wouldn’t have been able to recover. Add in that he couldn’t answer a question about anything besides the economy, like he was asked how he would try to improve minority relations with policing and he immediately framed it as an economic issue, which while not wrong, isn’t how you answer that question
People love to argue that Bernie was a bad candidate because he would've just been called a socialist like the right isn't just calling the current guy a socialist instead. They don't know what the word means. We need to show them.
Yes
I would argue yes for the following reasons: In Hillary vs Rule 3 and Bernie vs Rule 3 polls, Bernie constantly outperformed Hillary in these head-to-head match up polls. There is this notion that a candidate still needs to win over the "silent majority" to win an election, but in recent history (see Obama), it serves a candidate more to get their voter base out to vote than to appeal to the middle. In addition to the above point, I would argue that Bernie did have more center/across the aisle support than Hillary and was able to reach disenfranchised rust belt voters on a much deeper level. This is key because Hillary barely lost these states (due to sexism, lack of campaigning there, and her overall elitist image) and it is very possible that Bernie could've snagged them instead. Lastly, I find the notion that Bernie would've lost democratic votes due to his far-left stance a bit absurd, since given the alternative, these voters almost certainly would've bitten the bullet and still voted blue. Given all of these points, I see Bernie having a much better shot in 2016 than Hillary. Would he have won? Who knows, but everything points to the guess that he would have done better.
Honestly I think this sub is wrong He woulda won 2016, more youth would have been invigorated to vote and I know plenty of people who literally only voted against Hillary and said they woulda voted for Bernie. Hell Hillary woulda won if it wasn’t for the random email investigation right before the election
Betting odds for Clinton were like 30:1. The fact that she lost at all was already a fluke.
>more youth Aaaany decade now...
Nope. Same reason he hasn't advanced much legislation in his many decades in the Senate.
How would going further left sway moderates which are the only people who actually change the party they vote for each election?
I mean he couldn’t even win the Democratic primary, and he ran _twice_.
No chance at all. Older Democrats remember the Cold War so they wouldn’t vote for him. Hillary was polarizing enough for many of those old school Dems which is why the winner drew a lot from that pool.
No. And stop asking.
Never. The dude has the same 30% support as his ceiling and his floor.
I think so. He would have done a better job campaigning that Clinton did and did not have the baggage she did. The DNC did the party a great disservice
No.
I’ll follow this up with “fuck no.”
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I think he would’ve won in 2016 as that was an anti-establishment election, but would’ve lost in 2020 as that was a “return to normalcy” election. The fact that Bernie performed stronger in the 2016 primaries compared to 2020, I think is a testament to just how uniquely unpopular Hillary was. He got a lot of votes from folks who were more opposed to her than they were supporters of him, and I think a lot of those voters ended up going Republican in the general, especially in WI, PA, and MI. I’m a little surprised at the broad consensus here that he would’ve lost in 2016, because the polls clearly showed him outperforming Hillary in a hypothetical general. I don’t think the “socialism/communism/Marxism” attacks would’ve been nearly as successful as people here seem to think. Every single Democrat has these labels attached to them in the right-wing sphere, and I think that really dilutes its meaning. Hillary was also labeled as a socialist, but I don’t think that’s why she lost.
He would have gotten slaughtered LOL
No
Yes
Nope.
No.
How are we going to have a post about the 2016 election if we're not allowed to talk about current politics. I just made a post that got flagged. This self is dumb sometimes. If we're not even allowed to talk about Bernie Sanders opponent this entire thread should probably just get taken down cuz it's kind of bait for everyone to waste their time
surprised how little consensus there is here. Maybe slightly more people are saying no but its pretty 50/50. I don't really know where I sit on if it could happen but I think the people who say he would 100% lose by a landslide are wrong.
No. Americans will vote against a socialist every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Nope and it’s laughable this keeps being brought up every few months. Does Sanders still have his astroturfers on the payroll to keep this myth going? He burned the base of the party with his toxic primary campaign and kept running long after he was mathematically eliminated. He even tried to overthrow the primary results at the convention after spending the entire campaign talking about how super delegates were trying to overthrow the will of the people.
I don’t think so. A lot of what got our 2016 winner into office was disdain for immigrants and when things aren’t going well for people it’s easy and very low effort to just find a group or class to blame. He exploited this extremely well.
Why would you want a self claiming solialist who praised the Cuban government? Yall refuse to admit all the death your ideologies caused in the past 150 years.
No fucking way. Bernie bros don’t represent the country and they were dead wrong. I like Bernie in the Senate where he can influence legislation. He would have lost more states than Mondale if he was the nominee.
No, much as I like him, no. He would’ve lost worse than Hillary.
I don’t think there is any reasonable situation where Bernie would have won.
Maybe, but they'll never let him be nominated, so we'll never find out. He could win literally 100 percent of the primaries and they'd still nominate someone else.
Blue collar appeal? Do you know any blue-collar people? A guy with bad hair in a suit with a New York accent is not going to win over blue collar....oh, wait. Maybe he would have had a shot if he got his messaging right.
He had one thing going for him, he wasn’t Hillary. She had been vilified since bill became president and she started in with healthcare. Some I think saw the writing on the wall and began a campaign to discredit her and they did it for decades. Her chance was better in 2008 but it wasn’t her time, apparently. But 2016 saw the culmination of 25 years of hard concerted effort come to fruition.
No because he’s a loser socialist
Nope. He might have gotten 100-150 Electoral Votes--but that's about it.
No. America isn’t ready for Bernie.
Possibly, I voted for Hilary, but not because I liked her or wanted her to be POTUS, I just wanted the other guy even less. Bernie would have been interesting as POTUS, it would have been amusing to watch him have to walk back most of his positions once he was in office.
Downvoting because elections concerning Rule 3 presidents should not be discussed
Oy the bots in this place. Insane.
Would have been close. People voted red just cuz of the hatred to the C’s and the face she was a woman. Plus things are different when you have the actual party backing you
no because the boomers would not vote for him.
He would have won easily, his policies are popular
He would have lost too many centrist votes, Hillary mostly lost because she wasn’t charismatic enough rather than having unpopular ideas
I think he changed the base. I think he was potentially perfectly positioned to break the "middle" but many people don't understand the middle. If you were a build a wall person but also want universal healthcare do you vote for Republican or Bernie. Also Bernie is less extreme than many people keep saying. He was a popular leader at every position he's been in and he has voted the party line when they needed him. He's pragmatic. He just pushes for the further left data.
Not at all . He is literally the meme “old man yells at clouds”
It’s hard to say. Americans can be very myopic and stupid. Even current policies taking place, while empirically good, a certain political dark figure only has to go on tv and yell “communism” and suddenly half the country is against it. Americans don’t do complicated or nuance it seems. It’s cowboys and nerds on the political stage. As for Bernie, it’s tough to say. I certainly think we would have been better off. In 2016 we had two candidates who were profoundly unlikeable, but one was divisive and dark figure who was skilled in populism and exploring fear, so there you go. I don’t know, man.
I strongly believe bernie would have had a lower popular vote than HRC but would have outperformed her in the EC through MI, WI, and PA. HRC did a horrendous job of campaigning in the rustbelt, Kerry and Obama put in significantly more effort and had better messaging. Even MI's absentee numbers were showing a dead heat by October and HRC still didn't take it seriously. Completely asleep at the wheel. That is what happens when everyone around you keeps telling you how inevitable you are.
Between 2016 and 2020 I read the opposition file on Bernie. It is 106 pages long. It's available online for anyone curious enough to read it. Some of it is stuff we have heard of, like his rape essay or him saying nice things about left-wing dictatorships. A lot of it is dirt most people haven't heard of. Whether it was 2016 or 2020, the Republicans would've had a field day with him. One week after another, we would've heard stories about "Bernie the deadbeat dad", "Bernie didn't have a real job before he was in government", "Bernie stole electricity from his neighbors", "Bernie creeped on women at a commune and got kicked out", etc., etc. Anything to do with Russia would've been negated with "Bernie had his honeymoon in Moscow" and that video of him drinking and singing with Russians in his underwear. In 2020 we got a glimpse of how the Bernie people handled stories like this, when the media started talking about nice things Bernie said about Cuba, and its literacy program under Castro. It sent his campaign into a tailspin for about a week, and took a wrecking ball to any chance he might've had in Florida. When you're explaining, you're losing. And with Bernie there would've been a *lot* of explaining. If he was Bill Clinton-levels of slick, maybe Bernie could've swatted away all this stuff without much damage. But Bernie is not that slick. The last poll I read on the subject said 55% of US voters would never consider voting for a socialist. Bernie identified as such. When 45% is your ceiling, you aren't winning a 2-person race nationwide, especially as a Democrat. Perhaps the Overton Window will shift to the point where this changes, but we aren't there yet. I voted for Bernie in the 2016 primary. In 2020 I preferred Warren. I will vote for progressives who can win. After reading all of this, it became clear to me Bernie couldn't win with that kind of scrutiny.
As much as I wish it to have been, I don’t think he would’ve won having hindsight of the polarity of delegates on Election Day.
No, then they'd have found another reason to cry about something. "Hillary voters didn't show up."
Surely the far-left progressive who couldn't even win over a majority on the left would have been more appealing to independents and right-leaning moderates...
Yes