Democrats court doom by backing Bernie Sanders. His ideas are toxic outside blue America. [View all]

[Gothmog]

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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.

And of course, those were only primary voters. What would the general electorate make of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.? We know that the Trump campaign will seek to label any Democratic nominee a “socialist” — a regular Republican tactic that usually goes nowhere because Democratic nominees have never really been socialists.

The charge would stick, because this is an identity that he himself has proudly trumpeted. And most Americans view socialism negatively, by a margin of 42-55%. That would be quite a weight around a nominee’s neck in a general election.
The potency of this pending attack is also underscored by Sanders’ central policy proposal: "Medicare for All." His plan would hand the government control over nearly a fifth of the American economy. It doesn’t take much Trumpian demagoguery to label that “socialized medicine.”

Candidate Bernie Sanders: America must end high-stakes testing, finally invest in public education
When voters outside the liberal base learned more about this plan over the course of last year, initial curiosity, driven by its bumper-sticker name, collapsed. November polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Cook Political Report found that “large shares of swing voters in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin" say a national Medicare for All plan is a bad idea.

And we don’t have to speculate about the political impact of Medicare for All. It was tested in the 2018 midterms when, as a University of Virginia study recently found, it cost Democrats in swing districts who embraced it nearly 5 points.