Bernie Sanders's agenda makes him the definition of unelectable [View all]

[brooklynite]

Washington Post

In the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is arguing that he is the Democratic candidate most likely to beat President Trump. He has touted his electability in speeches and interviews and on social media, and his campaign has said it welcomes a debate on electability.

We should have that debate, because the fact is that the United States has never elected anyone as president who is as far left as Sanders. The only modern Democratic nominees approaching Sanders’s ideological views were former vice president Walter Mondale in 1984 and then-Sen. George McGovern in 1972. Together, they won a scant 30 electoral college votes and lost the popular vote by a combined 35 million votes. Mondale’s wipe-out was the biggest electoral college loss in U.S. history.

For those who say these landslide races were ages ago, and that Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan, fair enough. How about December 2019? That is when Sanders clone Jeremy Corbyn got routed by Trump clone Boris Johnson in the British parliamentary elections, sending the Labour Party to what some said was its worst defeat in more than 80 years. Corbyn, who Sanders predicted would lead his party to a resounding victory and “should be a lesson for the Democratic Party,” tanked. He “literally repelled voters,” former Labour MP David Milliband wrote after the debacle.

For Sanders to have a chance of winning, let alone proving to be the most electable as he claims, Americans would suddenly have to become comfortable with socialism. That would be quite a change, since, as of three months ago, socialism was viewed negatively in the United States by a 13-percentage-point margin (55 percent negative, 42 percent positive), according to the Pew Research Center.