Bernie Sanders Can’t Win!!
Class loathing feels so good, but it is ultimately self-defeating.
Give Sanders credit for moving public opinion along on a living wage, higher taxes on the rich and the need for immediate action to stem the immolation of the planet. Most great ideas start on the fringe and move to the middle.
But some of his other ideas are stillborn, or never get beyond the fringe. Socialism, despite its flavor-of-the-month appeal to young people, is not popular with the general public. Just 39 percent of Americans view socialism positively, a bare uptick from 2010, compared with 87 percent who have a positive view of free enterprise, Gallup found last fall.
What’s more, American confidence in the economy is now at the highest level in nearly two decades. That’s hardly the best condition for overthrowing the system.
So-called Medicare for all, once people understand that it involves eliminating all private insurance, polls at barely above 40 percent in some surveys, versus the 70 percent who favor the option of Medicare for all who want it. Other polls show majority support. But cost is a huge concern. And even Sanders cannot give a price tag for nationalizing more than one-sixth of the economy.
A ban on fracking is a poison pill in a must-win state like Pennsylvania, which Democrats lost by just over 44,000 votes in 2016. Eliminating Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another Sanders plan, is hugely unpopular with the general public.
Sanders is a rigid man, and he projects grumpy-old-man rigidity, with his policy prescriptions frozen in failed Marxist pipe dreams. He’s unlikely to change.
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Democrats court doom by backing Bernie Sanders. His ideas are toxic outside blue America.
Sanders has never won anything that really matters outside of Vermont, and all the available data shows his brand is a flop in red and purple states.
Trump will rightly call Sanders socialist
In fact, Sanders lost to Clinton by more than 200,000 votes in the nine states of the Midwest. In the three onetime Blue Wall battleground states, she topped him by over 45,000 votes, though he beat her in Wisconsin and edged her by a point in Michigan. In Ohio, Clinton won by 14 points and nearly 166,000 votes. The best you can say about this Sanders argument is that he didn’t lose as badly in the Midwest as he did elsewhere.
Indeed, in the Sunbelt, the other area that Democrats hope to make a general election battleground in 2020, Sanders got absolutely crushed. He lost Florida 64-33%, Arizona 58-40%, North Carolina 55-41% and Texas 65-33%. Taken together, Clinton trounced Sanders in those four states by more than 1.2 million votes.
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