Lets be Honest Hilary blew an easy election victory in 2016

and

Trump blew an easy election victory in 2020

As for what Biden did

2 billion in Covid relief which experts now say 1 billion is fraud
1 Billion in Infrastructure $ Big accomplishment and needed

Now why not list all the things he promised but has not delivered on

Add in Inflation and a potential recession , Interest rates and the border

Big defeat for Dems in 2022

LOL, an upstart geriatric socialist from Vermont should never have had a chance against the establishment-anointed candidate. The fact that an outsider like Bernie was even competitive should have told you that Third Way centrism is badly broken. Hell, they might have gone 0-2 if it weren’t for a global pandemic.

The only easy election of the last 20 years was 2008, when dems had a near double digit lead in generic ballot polling and ended up winning by 9+. Every other year neither party could get much separation.

The point isn't that HRC was a good candidate in a national election. The point is that Bernie would have gotten beaten by more. I have no way to prove the proposition because Bernie was never able to win a primary, but I haven't seen any evidence to remotely persuade me that a Bernie-style candidate is nationally viable.

To win a national election, you need to win swing states. If swing states were fertile ground for candidates like Bernie, then you would expect to see progressive candidates occasionally beating Republicans in state-wide elections in those states. But that isn't who wins state-wide elections in Pennsylvania, NC, Virginia, Arizona, etc.

Your logic doesn’t hold: a primary election is a very different thing from a general election. Polling data suggested Bernie had an edge over Trump in a general election. Of course, no one can say for sure how that would have played out, but it’s hard to imagine him running a less competent campaign than Hillary.

Biden is and always has been a corporate hack. He's from ****ing Delaware which was where corporations went to buy their politicians even before it was main stream.

But you're not wrong. He's to the left of Hillary and Obama by a sliver.

Oh and...you're not left anymore then Trump voters aren't the GOP. No matter what delusions you're under.

We'll never know.

But you'd be foolish to underestimate Bernie and his message. People tend to like him. Not the **** libs or fascists of course, but average Americans.

Since neither party represents the voters it's reasonable that people switch back and forth as 4-8 years is enough time to forget why you voted against those people the last time.

System working as designed.

Even worse, some of the states that you think would be most likely to elect progressives to state offices (VT, MA) instead have elected moderate Non-Trumpy Republicans who basically do nothing but have very high approval ratings. If national Republicans weren't so far right those guys would be considered Presidential candidates.

You conveniently ignored this part.

I don't underestimate Bernie's message. I don't dislike Bernie. I think that his message is very, very appealing to those who vote for him. And a lot of people have voted for him over the last two presidential primaries.

For ten years now, several people in this forum have insisted that Bernie's message is very appealing to people who voted for someone else, whether that someone else was HRC, Biden, Trump, or whoever. In support of that proposition, they inevitably cite their favorite opinion polls and ignore election results.

At some point, you have to at least consider the possibility that people are voting for the policies they prefer.

Of those states, Hillary only won VA by a few %! Look I don’t have a crystal ball, but the argument that she was the best person to run isn’t supported at all.

Well, we do have all the polls that show how popular his policies would be.

I'm not sure it his policies = his message but representing the interests of the people who vote to put you in power is kind of an easy win.

It just annoys the people who are at the front of the line sucking up the tax dollars of the poor voters. And I suspect many of the nay sayers vis a vis Bernie are in that camp.

Sure she was.

Just ask Paul D.

He still has his "I'm with her" t-shirt over his bed.

It's sort of hard to even handicap Sanders in a national election vs a republican because the last 3 presidents overwhelmingly won the black vote in the primary. Like if you just give him the same black turnout % that Clinton or Biden got in the general he has a shot, but obviously could still lose. And if he did substantially worse he almost certainly loses.

Absolute worst-case scenario is Bernie loses the election that Hillary couldn’t win but at least the Dems go down swinging and have a coherent populist message to take into the next cycle instead of whatever centrist pablum they’re currently running on.

Sure. The worst case scenario if Bernie had won the nomination is that he would have lost the general election. That's pretty much the worst case scenario no matter who wins the nomination.

Here is the reality:

A strong candidate would have beaten Trump handily under almost all possible scenarios.

HRC was a below average candidate who would have beaten Trump in spite of being below average but for a couple of events that were outside her control and some poor strategic decisions in the last six weeks of the campaign. There are a lot of ways that election could have played out that would have resulted in her winning a narrow victory.

Bernie is an important voice in the party but an extraordinarily weak candidate who would have lost handily under almost all possible scenarios.

People overstate the importance of candidates. Nobody in the last 20 years has significantly beat or underperformed the generic ballot at the start of the primary.

Generic ballots are very interesting for Congressional midterms. They are less interesting for presidential elections because, even before the primaries begin, it is often certain or highly probable who at least one of the candidates will be. And in the modern era of tight elections, the candidate doesn't have to impact the vote that much in order affect the outcome of the election

The point is all we know about how some other candidate would have done is about the same.

I understand your point, but how do we know that?

This is just not supported by the polling data.

I mean we can’t “know” a different candidate wouldn’t 100% or 0% of the vote. But the data we do have looks exactly like it would if candidates didn’t matter at all. I don’t believe that’s actually true, but it’s not a bad place to start.

What is not supported by polling data, state-wide election results involving progressive candidates, common sense, or anything else is that the idea that a candidate like Bernie could carry swing states.

If you know that Candidates A and B (or at least Candidate B) are certain or likely to be the nominees, then a generic poll asking whether you prefer Candidate A's party or Candidate B's party to control the presidency isn't really a "candidate blind" poll.