Trump will rightly call Sanders socialist
In fact, Sanders lost to Clinton by more than 200,000 votes in the nine states of the Midwest. In the three onetime Blue Wall battleground states, she topped him by over 45,000 votes, though he beat her in Wisconsin and edged her by a point in Michigan. In Ohio, Clinton won by 14 points and nearly 166,000 votes. The best you can say about this Sanders argument is that he didn’t lose as badly in the Midwest as he did elsewhere.

Indeed, in the Sunbelt, the other area that Democrats hope to make a general election battleground in 2020, Sanders got absolutely crushed. He lost Florida 64-33%, Arizona 58-40%, North Carolina 55-41% and Texas 65-33%. Taken together, Clinton trounced Sanders in those four states by more than 1.2 million votes.

And of course, those were only primary voters. What would the general electorate make of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.? We know that the Trump campaign will seek to label any Democratic nominee a “socialist” — a regular Republican tactic that usually goes nowhere because Democratic nominees have never really been socialists.

The charge would stick, because this is an identity that he himself has proudly trumpeted. And most Americans view socialism negatively, by a margin of 42-55%. That would be quite a weight around a nominee’s neck in a general election.
The potency of this pending attack is also underscored by Sanders’ central policy proposal: "Medicare for All." His plan would hand the government control over nearly a fifth of the American economy. It doesn’t take much Trumpian demagoguery to label that “socialized medicine.”

Candidate Bernie Sanders: America must end high-stakes testing, finally invest in public education
When voters outside the liberal base learned more about this plan over the course of last year, initial curiosity, driven by its bumper-sticker name, collapsed. November polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Cook Political Report found that “large shares of swing voters in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin" say a national Medicare for All plan is a bad idea.

And we don’t have to speculate about the political impact of Medicare for All. It was tested in the 2018 midterms when, as a University of Virginia study recently found, it cost Democrats in swing districts who embraced it nearly 5 points.

Rep. Conor Lamb, 35, won a special election in the suburbs of Pittsburgh 18 months after Trump carried the district by 20 points. His campaign made time for only one national surrogate: Biden.

“He reminds me of my son Beau,” Biden said at a rally at the Carpenter’s Training Center in Collier, Pennsylvania, a week before the March 2018 election, referring to his son who died of brain cancer in 2015.

Biden’s endorsement was not the only reason for Lamb’s victory, but the campaign did think the visit from the former vice president offered Lamb a chance to build credibility with union workers.

Lamb is now endorsing Biden to be the Democratic nominee, and he’s in good company. Biden has far more endorsements from elected officials than any other candidate. The FiveThirtyEight endorsement tracker, which keeps track of high-profile endorsements and weights them by influence, has Biden scoring 237 points — nearly triple the second-place candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who scores an 81.

Sen. Bernie Sanders trails Warren at 55. Sen. Amy Klobuchar is next with 50.
Other candidates have picked up pockets of support in important states — in Michigan, five state lawmakers are backing Warren and the Young Democrats have come out for Sanders. But Biden has way outpaced his competitors in numbers, and he’s earned endorsements from Democrats who’ve won tough races in places that will be tough again in 2020.

Biden benefits from a field of weak opponents, none of whom could sustain their brief polling bumps, a significant reduction in the number of caucuses and that nature of primary voting — where momentum for the frontrunner builds and the laggards quickly collapse. Only Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) poses a challenge, and there is plenty of angst about him.

The most important dynamic for Biden is that the race is rapidly narrowing to Biden vs. Sanders. Once promising candidates have dropped out (Kamala Harris, Corey Booker). Former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) were not able to sustain their momentary polling jumps. For Buttigieg and Warren, their moment has passed — it is very rare that voters return to candidates they sampled and rejected. Too bad for Warren that newspaper endorsements are worthless. That leaves Joe and Bernie.

Make no mistake, Sanders is a tough out. His supporters are dedicated and won’t abandon him, even if he starts to lag. Sanders leads most polls in Iowa (but not all) and will certainly win New Hampshire.

But Sanders has two problems. First, Democratic voters view Biden as a stronger candidate against Donald Trump and put beating the president as their number one priority (69 percent to 31 percent). Democratic voters view Biden as a winner against Trump, with 65 percent thinking he can win to 13 percent who think he can’t, while Sanders only polls 52 percent to 26 percent. Both totals top the Democratic field.

Second, the Democrats’ nomination process has become much less favorable for Sanders by replacing caucuses with primaries. Sanders’ ability to string out the 2016 nomination contest was propped up by caucuses. He won 11 of 13 caucuses — he only lost Iowa (barely) and Nevada, which were very high turnout caucuses. After Nevada, caucus turnout fell significantly, leaving the process dominated by progressive activists — and thus benefiting Sanders.