Bernie Sanders won't commit to leaving the race if he fails to secure the Democratic nomination

[thesquanderer]

129. Addressing your points...

There is nothing in the quotes you provided that reference the polling you are now mentioning.

Those polls were common knowledge among most who were following politics in 2016, but I mentioned it in the post for context in case you or anyone else following the conversation happen to have forgotten or was not following this stuff four years ago. Here's what the polls were looking like then, and it certainly was the topic of a lot of conversation here at the time:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_sanders-5565.html

And here were Clinton's numbers vs. Trump for comparison (you'll have to scroll down to get to the same dates, since polling for Sanders stopped once Clinton was the nominee):

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton-5491.html

Okay, that addresses half of his sentence, where he said "some say" he could have beaten Trump, what about the other half, where he said "some say" the process was rigged against him? Well, yeah, some people were saying that too.

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman resigned after email leaks showed the ostensibly neutral organization favoring Clinton over Sanders. See this article from The Guardian.

Her replacement, Donna Brazile, confirmed that the DNC had not been neutral in that contest, see this article from Vanity Fair.

Elizabeth Warren agreed, see this article from the BBC.

And there are numerous other ways people felt the process was rigged, some more valid than others, but you can get an idea from this article at Salon.

I suppose Sanders could have provided more context by prefacing his "some people say" by talking about all the reasons some people actually do say these things, but seriously, that would have been worse. All he wanted to do was point out that "some people say" works both ways, and then get back on topic. Anyone who followed 2016 already knew the rest, and this was not the time or place for a diatribe about past grievances.