It's Bernie, not Biden, who has the electability problem

[Gothmog]

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has decided to attack Joe Biden, claiming that the moderate former vice president, who sits atop virtually every national poll with solid African American support, is somehow unelectable. His argument is that Biden couldn’t possibly be elected because he voted for the Iraq War nearly 20 years ago and for the North American Free Trade Agreement 27 years ago. There is no data to support that argument and, logically, one would think that running as a self-described socialist now is a much bigger electability problem than Biden’s past votes, but we do not have to speculate.

Some of Sanders’s signature, super-progressive issues play very poorly in swing states. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s Blue Wall Voices Project last year found that “large shares of swing voters in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin say stopping detainments at the U.S. border for people cross into the country illegally and a national Medicare-for-all plan are ‘bad ideas.’ ”
Moreover, polling over the last week or so shows clearly that picking Sanders would be a gamble. While he once was leading outside the margin of error in head-to-head matchups against President Trump, he is now losing or at best within the margin of error while Biden continues to be the most viable candidate against Trump.....

Moreover, given that Democratic victories are heavily dependent on African American turnout, it is difficult to see that Sanders, who gets a fraction of the African American support that Biden does, could turn out a bigger African American vote than Biden could. (Recall that in the 2016 primary, Hillary Clinton walloped Sanders among African American voters.) In the latest Fox News South Carolina poll, Biden gets 43 percent of the African American vote, Sanders just 12 percent.

And finally, remember that in the 2018 midterms, super-progressive candidates endorsed by Sanders did not flip a single House seat from red to blue. All those House seats were flipped by Biden-type moderates.

There will be a debate next week. That might be a good moment to quiz Sanders on where his claim to superior electability comes from. So far, there is not a whole lot — if any — evidence to back up his boast.