Stephen Bush: Would Bernie Sanders have done better against Donald Trump?
Sanders’ big problem in securing the nomination was that he struggled among African-American voters, particularly those over 30. (He did better among younger African-Americans.) It seems…bold…to put it mildly to suggest he would have been able to do a better job of turning them out than the woman who defeated him among them. A lot of the commentary around this, I think, comes because most white liberal commentators know people who struggled to vote for Clinton and instead went for a leftwing third-party or wrote in Sanders – but don’t have older black relatives who would have struggled to vote for a candidate who had called on Obama to face a primary challenge in 2012.
Just as Clinton struggled with the young in the primaries and to turn them out in the general, it seems highly unlikely that Sanders would not have struggle with minority turnout. Not least as part of Clinton’s problem was that turnout among those groups was not high enough to compensate for the fact that, thanks to the Trump message, white voters are beginning to vote on “ethno-political” lines, favouring the Republicans, switching a problem with the young for a problem with African-Americans would have ended up with the Democrats in the same place, by a different margin.
From: Would Bernie Sanders have done better against Donald Trump?
So by this reasoning Trump had difficulty with the most conservative elements of the Republican Party in the primaries, particularly those religious-identifiers, and therefore Trump was bound to have trouble in the general election.Report
Is it a secret that rightward drift coalesces on a relative few poles (that are not unwilling to form coalitions of convenience), while leftward drift fractures into the People’s Front of Judea (and are not unwilling to form circular firing squads)?
It’s a particular dysfunction of the Left, but by its very nature it means that the situations are not symmetrical.Report
The election of Trump has brought out the left-wing firing squads like crazy.
It’s funny, in all the screaming, it’s like 60 million Trump voters don’t even exist. They’re quick to blame Clinton, the DNC, the ‘tone’ of liberals, the ACA, Bernie Sanders, any platform you can imagine….
But on the fact that 60 million people voted for Trump? Apparently they have no agency.Report
There are going to be people that are going to those that point to Bernie’s excellent poll numbers recently, but that ignores that he just spent a long time with pretty much everyone either carrying his water or refraining from going after him. Clinton’s people needed him as a surrogate so they never wanted to take him down (unless he started to look like he would have won the primary). The Republicans on the other hand wanted to boost him up as this fine upstanding man who got treated so unfairly by Crooked Hilary. Nobody was pulling out their opposition research on him this year.Report
Brent,
Hillary’s backers weren’t quite so nice to Mr. Sanders as you might think. They apparently had to resort to some rather extreme measures to make certain he’d say their script.
(Why hillary’s team thought that just because they had convinced him to smoke the mirrors, that all his “followers” would show up and mindlessly vote for her? They don’t understand people who aren’t mindless sheep).Report
In public they had to be nice to him for strategic reasons. What they did or didn’t do in back rooms in reality or Kimmie-land isn’t relevant to my thesis.Report
True enough. What is relevant, now that I’m thinking of it, is that most attacks against Bernie run on Seriously Old Propaganda.
Stuff the boomers buy (having been exposed to it ad infinitum), but that the Millenials say “come again? What’s a socialist, and why is it a bad thing?”Report
I think this depends. Clinton won around 85% of the African-American vote. Thats what a generic Democratic candidate usually gets among the African-American vote if not more. Sanders would have probably gotten the same. The argument that Sanders would have done better than Trump comes from the fact that he did better than Clinton in the crucial states where Clinton lost to Trump by a razor thin margin. Sanders might have won Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by razor thin margins.Report
Sanders would have won PA in a walk. 8% lower democratic turnout.
People who think that a horribly rigged primary means anything about Black Conservadems liking bernie? Nutso.
Conservadems differ from normal dems in that they’re more approving of torture, mainly. And punishment in general. Possibly a little more scared of terrorists.
Bernie’s not going to run on repealing the death penalty, dudes!Report
Sanders would have convinced me to vote for Trump rather than Johnson. One of the hallmarks of socialism is food shortages. That makes my involvement personal and is a big enough threat that Trump easily becomes the lesser evil.
Also Sanders never had bricks thrown at him. The DNC and RNC both went really light on him, if he’d been the actual nominee the gloves would have come off.Report
World average: 2780 calories/day.
Belgium: 3690 (#5)
Ireland: 3530 (#11)
Canada: 3530 (#13)
Norway: 3460 (#16)
Denmark: 3400 (#22)
Cuba: 3300 (#27)
Netherlands: 3240 (#31)
Finland: 3220 (#35)
New Zealand: 3150 (#39)
Sweden: 3120 (#44)
China: 2970 (!)
Hellholes, all…
You need to separate causes. An authoritarian paramilitary dystopia that is nominally capitalistic is going to look a lot like an authoritarian paramilitary dystopia that is nominally socialist. Namely empty shelves and people disappearing. And truly Communist states have a history of problems when the Supreme Leader is an idiot, which is about 100% of the time, historically.
Thing is, it doesn’t seem to torpedo the economy of a developed country when they put their thumb on the scale a bit harder and make a social democracy a bit more socialist. Possibly even the reverse, in some contexts. It’s certainly not something to be feared out of hand.Report
China? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
As for the others, their growth rates are consistently low enough that we have this impression that it’s natural for an “advanced” (i.e. socialistic) economy. There are serious costs to socialism (aka “command and control”), the biggest is running out of other people’s money.Report
Right, Bernie is a “socialist” like Mao’s China, not like today’s Sweden.Report
You’d prefer Poland (which also had empty store shelves)?Report
The continual libertarian inability to distinguish between European social democracy and Marxist-Leninism never fails to astound. Its all or nothing for ideologues like you. The actual conditions on the ground don’t matter.Report
Its not just economics. Civil rights has become “cultural marxism.”Report
I think Sanders “criminal justice reform” position woulda played really well amongst blacks, whites, hispanics, everyone, in the general, myself. Better than … what were Hillary’s views on that stuff? I can’t remember. And that’s especially so in contrast to Trump’s “whatcha gotta lose? Stop and Frisk!” policy position.
I also think Sanders message about trade, taxes, the 1%, all that, woulda played much better against Trump than “If you like Obama’s policies then vote for me!”.
Counterfactuals are, by definition, hard to factually counter, tho…Report
Stillwater,
http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/
Without Hillary, we don’t have Trump.Report