Is Sanders an election-year disaster waiting to happen?

[thesquanderer]

165. It's possible that a progressive ticket could do better than a moderate one.

Copying from another post of mine:

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I wrote about this in my post in the thread at https://www.democraticunderground.com/1287486770

The OP had quoted from an article that said:

Ideologues are elected more often than they used to be. Outsiders are elected more often, too. And the percentage of true swing voters is shrinking, Utych said. So does that mean someone like Sanders is more electable and someone like former Vice President Joe Biden is less electable? Electability here becomes a game of divining which group is more important to winning — swing voters or the partisan base. But that’s no more accurate than trying to estimate how sexist your neighbors are. “Which segment is bigger … there’s not great information on that,” Utych said. “Anything you say is just guessing.”

And in my agreement, I expanded on it this way:

We really don't know which group gets us more votes. Biden {or your moderate of choice} and Sanders (i.e. our two extremes) would both get the vote of virtually every true Dem (certainly when the alternative is Trump). But beyond that, what gets us more votes... appealing to the moderate middle and "reasonable" Republicans? or appealing to the more extreme left partisans and the anti-establishment outsiders who want to shake things up? In 2016, we attempted to appeal to the moderate middle, while Trump went for the highly partisan and anti-establishment group. We lost that one. Something to think about.

As I've also said elsewhere, I think come November, it is highly likely that any Dem candidate gets all the states Hillary did... yes, even Sanders, who I think is actually positioned pretty well. Some voters in those states may like Hillary more than Bernie, others may like Bernie more than Hillary, but either way, enough of them don't like Trump that they even chose a candidate in 2016 who was underwater in favorables (that is, to get as close as she did, she actually had to get many votes from people who didn't particularly like her in those states). So I think all those "anti Trump" states likewise go to Bernie. If anything, the demographics favor Bernie more this time, because 4 years later, we have a new influx of voters who were too young to be eligible to vote last time, and the youth vote heavily favors Sanders.

So to me, the big variable as to whether or not Bernie can beat Trump is whether he can sufficiently out-perform Hillary to be able to beat Trump in at least three of these states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Florida. I think he has enough working class appeal to win that chunk of what Hillary couldn't in at least three of those states. I think most if not all of our other candidates do as well. So I am optimistic.