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Okay now do swing states, the only states that actually end up mattering in presidential elections. Bernie captivated audiences on Fox news during his campaign, appeared in Republican town halls and listened to people. Id bet you dollars to donuts Bernie would outperform her by miles in the swing states.
I assure you there are Fox news viewers in Vermont, too.
Okay?
Given his lackluster election results, apparently they don't actually find him very captivating.
Youd be wrong. Youd also be wrong to automatically assume they didn't vote for him, unless you have any data that says that. In fact wasn't Democrat turnout down while Republican turnout was up? If hes missing votes it makes way more sense its from dems who stayed home. Unless you have any data that says otherwise, the lower dem turnout in all non swing states explains that a lot better than assuming all fox news viewers simply voted against him. Especially since Trump lost the VT primary. More than half the republicans in that state voted against him during the pimary in favor of Niki Haley, how many of them you think went back to Trump? They clearly don't mind voting for a woman.
I'm saying that unlike nearly every other Democratic Senator, he performed worse than Harris. That's a lackluster result.
If he somehow won Fox News voters, then it was at the expense of losing even more voters elsewhere. That's not a recipe for winning nationwide.
And no, you cannot blame it on Vermont. Harris turned out Vermont voters, why couldn't Sanders turn out as many as she did?
7% of votes this cycle were bullet votes, no downballot races at all, that's up from about half a percent typically. Harris got more votes simply because of the race she was running in.
So people were literally voting for Harris, but refusing to vote for Sanders. Whereas nearly everywhere else, people voted for their Senator but not Harris.
That tells you all you need to know.
I mean maybe if they elected president based on who wins Vermont but the actual race takes all 50 states. You can't simply extrapolate one state across vastly different demographics, like all the swing states that Harris lost worse than any Democrat in recent history. But ill give you the point that if we decided presidenr based on Vermont's vote count alone then Bernie wouldn't be president. Trumps from NY, he must have won that state too since you seem to think its impossible to win an election and not do well in your home state. If you think Bernie doesnt beat Kamalas swing state margins you're on something, right wingers constantly allign with people like Bernie and AOC, AOC just asked all those righrt wingers why too, it was a huge article where she got responses why people who voted for Trump also votes for or support her.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying there is exactly one data point that directly compares Bernie to Kamala, and it shows more support for Kamala than Bernie.
And since that is the only place where they can be compared, there is no evidence at all that Bernie would have more support than Kamala in other states.
There are right wingers in Vermont too. That's why their governor is a Republican. Yet among all the people who voted for Gov Scott, there weren't enough Bernie supporters to make a difference.
In other words people were willing to vote for Harris and a Republican governor more than they were willing to vote for Sanders. He simply does not have the support you think he does.
Right wingers do not constantly align with AOC. There very few Trump + AOC voters, she was just interested in hearing from them.
Sounds like people ain't never been to the northeast kingdom.
... So he would do worse in the solid blue states but better in the purple states because... red leaning voters are secretly socialists but blue leaning voters are neoliberal scum?
Read my comment again and dont skip the part about him being well recieved on Fox News and Republican town halls. Its right there why ignore it? Was kamala as well recieved by fox news viewers?
I must be a little slow.
Please explain to me why you think that a candidate who is CONSIDERABLY farther to the left than Kamala is going to outperform her with republican voters. Unless it really is just "he did a good interview on fox". And how that would apparently be better even though he was doing worse with blue voters.
Here is a hint: It is because he has a dick and people are misogynistic as fuck. And you know who else has a dick (as documented in multiple sexual assault and rape allegations)?
I think you're right, you are a little slow. It was more than one interview, it was more than one town hall. People voted for abortion and trump on the same ballot and you cant fathom working party politics playing better among those people?
You're either slower that you admit or purposfully ignorant to further your opinion. You add nothing to a conversation and ignore or belittle anything contrary to your viewpoint. Find someone with more time to invest in teaching slow people, because I may as well be talking with a Republican the way you twist everything I write.
But... I didn't vote for Bernie in either primary. So I guess that makes me a lefitst? I mean, I consider myself to be more of a very progressive (American definition of) liberal but... your logic is infallible.
Also: You need to actually make a point before you huff off in a mess of ad hominem. But I am sure all us slow people don't understand the 9-d chess you are explaining to us or whatever.
No, it's because Trump-leaning voters are very blatantly populist and anti-status-quo and Bernie would deliver that more genuinely than Trump.
Ah yes, defeat Trump by appealing to conservatives. A time-tested strategy.
No, damn it! Quit being willfully obtuse. Why can't you acknowledge the fact that damn near a third of the country is so disaffected by both parties' refusal to meet their needs that they'd given up on voting at all? That's the demographic -- people clamoring for change, any change, because the status quo has failed them -- that fake-populist Trump appealed to for his margin of victory, and that real-populist Bernie could've appealed to even better.
Bernie can't bring out people who don't vote. If he could, he would have won a lot more votes in Vermont.
Okay, I need you to understand something: not voting in a primary is not the same thing as not voting in the general election. That goes double for the kinds of people who are pissed off at the two-party system in general.
Do you realize how fundamentally stupid it is to respond to the argument "Bernie was capable of winning the general election precisely because he would appeal to the kinds of people who don't vote in Democratic primaries" by saying "but if he can't even win the primary how could he win the general election?"
I'm not talking about the primary. I'm talking about the general election we just held. There were plenty of Senators running for re-election, including Bernie.
Nearly all of those Senators won more votes than Harris. In other words nearly all won over Harris voters and won over some non-Harris voters on top of that.
But not Bernie. Unlike the other Senators, he failed to outperform Harris. So it's clear he doesn't have some magical power to win the votes of people who don't vote for Democrats. Quite the opposite, in fact.
His opponent also failed to outperform Trump -- in other words, there were fewer total votes cast for that race than there were for President, i.e. some people just voted for President and left the rest of the ballot blank. As for percentages, Sanders was within a percent of Harris, which sounds like statistical noise to me.
On top of that, what matters to this conversation is how people in states Trump won would behave, not how people in Vermont would behave. Vermont is less unequal and less impoverished than most other US states, so there's plenty of reason to think that his platform would be even more popular in places other than Vermont, if those voters had the chance to actually hear about it.
Yes, that's exactly what they did. They intentionally left a blank next to Sanders's name.
They sure didn't do that in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, voters made sure to vote for Tammy Baldwin. In fact, many people voted for Tammy and left the presidency blank, or even voted for Trump. And Wisconsin is equally un-impoverished and even less unequal than Vermont.
Likewise Ruben Gallego and Elissa Slotkin proved their ability to bring in people who didn't want to vote for Harris. Whereas Sanders failed. The future of the party lies with those who deliver actual results.
Sanders supporters keep making excuses for him, but the fact is that his supposed ability to bring in non-Democrats has never been demonstrated in a real election. It's just wishful thinking, exactly the same as "There's plenty of reason to think that Kamala will be popular with white women".