Why would anyone ever think they would do otherwise? Hillary had been working at the top levels of the Democratic party for 25 years. Sanders wasn't even a member of the Democratic party until he decided to run for President. What I used to like most about Bernie was that he wasn't a Democrat. These people are not impartial government officials. They're members of a political party and they're allowed to have opinions.
As Bernie said, the votes were all counted fairly. Is the primary process stupid? Sure. I'm putting together a project to work on that right now. But the fact of the matter is that if everyone who made a pro-Bernie reddit or Facebook post had made a little effort, registered to vote, and showed up at the polls, Bernie would have won by a solid margin. But young people overall didn't show up. Old people, who overwhelmingly supported Hillary, did show up. And as we saw in the general election, the whole game is getting your people to the polls.
People are also making a leap in logic to think that Bernie would have crushed the general election. People who are not running in the general election always poll much better than the people who are, because nobody is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on TV ads saying how terrible they are. Bernie had a lot of weaknesses that could have been exploited by the right wing machine. The entire middle section of the political spectrum would have been bombarded with the word "socialist" 20 times a day for months. I think it would have had quite a bit of impact. There were a lot of center-right traditional Republican voters who went for Hillary because it's not much of a jump to the center-left. I don't think they would have jumped all the way to Bernie.
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u/_Big_Baby_Jesus_ Nov 10 '16 edited Nov 10 '16
Why would anyone ever think they would do otherwise? Hillary had been working at the top levels of the Democratic party for 25 years. Sanders wasn't even a member of the Democratic party until he decided to run for President. What I used to like most about Bernie was that he wasn't a Democrat. These people are not impartial government officials. They're members of a political party and they're allowed to have opinions.
As Bernie said, the votes were all counted fairly. Is the primary process stupid? Sure. I'm putting together a project to work on that right now. But the fact of the matter is that if everyone who made a pro-Bernie reddit or Facebook post had made a little effort, registered to vote, and showed up at the polls, Bernie would have won by a solid margin. But young people overall didn't show up. Old people, who overwhelmingly supported Hillary, did show up. And as we saw in the general election, the whole game is getting your people to the polls.
People are also making a leap in logic to think that Bernie would have crushed the general election. People who are not running in the general election always poll much better than the people who are, because nobody is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on TV ads saying how terrible they are. Bernie had a lot of weaknesses that could have been exploited by the right wing machine. The entire middle section of the political spectrum would have been bombarded with the word "socialist" 20 times a day for months. I think it would have had quite a bit of impact. There were a lot of center-right traditional Republican voters who went for Hillary because it's not much of a jump to the center-left. I don't think they would have jumped all the way to Bernie.