Why Sanders could--or couldn't--have won

[thesquanderer]

Last edited Fri Jan 20, 2017, 11:45 AM - Edit history (1)

Okay, I'm late to this party, everyone's going home and the door is about to be locked. But this is my first time back since the lockout, so having participated in plenty of discussions in the primary days, I felt I wanted to put my two cents in, if I could. Though, not having read nearly all that's been said, I'll apologize in advance for anything here that may have already been beaten to death. Which may well be everything.

I’m one of those who voted for Sanders in the primary in part because I thought he would have a better chance of winning in November in general, and particularly against Trump.

Of course, it is impossible to know what would have happened if Sanders were our nominee. OTOH, Hillary lost. So, considering that there are only two possible outcomes, he couldn't have done any worse. So, the outcome would have had to have been either the same, or better! (At least for the presidency itself.)

People like Pnwmom are right and make a very good point (i.e. in the thread at www.democraticunderground.com/12512656239 ) that there was plenty that could have been thrown at Sanders that was not thrown at him during the primary, but I have a hard time imagining that any state that picked Hillary over Trump would have picked Trump over Sanders. I mean, pnwmom mentions how Sanders would have been DOA in Florida... but Hillary lost Florida anyway. What state flips the other direction? No matter what the Republicans threw at Sanders, there's no way New York, the west coast, or the New England states were going Trump. Just like there was no way Sanders or Hillary were ever going to get some of the red states. I doubt there is much disagreement about this.

OTOH, with his strong anti-establishment anti-wall-street persona, I think Bernie would have been well-positioned to swing Michigan and Wisconsin (where he beat Hillary in the primaries), and possibly Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa. As I said, we'll never know for sure. All we know for sure is that Hillary lost them.

I also think that many of the Johnson/Stein/abstaining voters who refused to vote for either Trump or Hillary would have considered voting for Bernie. And as I said back in the primary days, no matter how much damage the Republicans could have done to Bernie, it would be very hard to create in a few months as much animosity toward him as they created toward Hillary over 30 years.

I think it's hard to deny that the Dems wouldn't at least have been better positioned with a candidate who wasn't underwater in favorability from the get-go, and (in 2016) wasn't so tied to establishment/wall street. Sanders (or Warren) would have at least started from a stronger position.

But in the end, of course, Hillary did get more raw votes than Trump, so what matters only is who got more votes in that small handful of states that swung the election. And there, it seemed to be very much about the issues that were right in the Sanders/Warren wheelhouse.

That said, there was another good argument, about how the “left wave” may not have been as strong as Sanders supporters think because, in fact, Russ Feingold lost in Wisconsin as well. And Zephyr Teachout didn’t win her race in New York. It's a good point, but I think it ignores the phenomenon of coattails... That is, rather than saying that the failure of these candidates to win indicates that the support for Sanders-level leftism wasn't there to be had, I think you can as easily consider the reverse, that those voters who stayed home who would have come out to vote for Sanders would have pulled these other candidates into victory on his own coattails.

Of course we'll never know, and the arguments saying that Sanders would have lost are not unreasonable and obviously impossible to prove wrong. But there are counter arguments that are just as good, and the only thing we do know for sure is that Clinton lost. (And that she lost against a very flawed candidate who was not particularly unbeatable.)

And while I understand the perspective that rehashing the past is irrelevant at this point, I think there remains a worthwhile on-going conversation to have, regarding whether the process by which the nominee is selected necessarily supports the selection of the candidate best suited to win the general. Maybe it's time for a breather from that, but it may well return as a major issue, say, three years from now.