Bernie Sanders Would Have Beaten Donald Trump Not So Fast
Sanders gained more votes than Hillary Clinton in key general election states. But voting behavior in the primaries is very different to voting on the big day
It has been a week since Donald Trump won the majority of electoral college votes and became president-elect of the US . It has been a week of endless questions and limited answers how? why? And, perhaps most important of all: what now?
More specifically, some have wondered whether Donald Trump would have been defeated if he had faced a different Democratic candidate: Bernie Sanders. On Wednesday, CNN journalist Wolf Blitzer asked Jane Sanders, wife of the former candidate for the Democratic nomination, if her husband would have had a better chance of beating Trump than Clinton. Absolutely, she replied, but it doesnt matter now.
Theres mixed evidence for that certainty.
In the primaries, Sanders gained more votes than Clinton in Wisconsin and Michigan. Those are important states. Wisconsin, a formerly Democratic state, was narrowly won by Trump in the presidential election on Tuesday. In Michigan, the race was even closer, with Trump winning by just 11,837 votes . If Clinton had won just 109,000 more votes in those states , we would be calling her, and not Trump, president-elect.
The story for Bernie Sanders though looks very different :
More accurate perhaps is polling that asks about broader attitudes rather than people .
Trump Can Absolutely Kill Him: Wall Street Shrugs Off Sanders
The finance world is treating the prospect of a President Sanders much like it generally dismissed a possible President Trump in 2016.
Sen. Bernie Sanders. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
02/12/2020 12:36 PM EST
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An avowed democratic socialist narrowly won the New Hampshire primary, propelled by promises to jack up taxes on the rich, nationalize health care and take a sledgehammer to the nations banking behemoths.
Wall Street has so far reacted to the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders with a massive yawn because few in the industry think the Vermont senator has a real shot at becoming president.
Stocks continue to pop to new highs even as Sanders climbs the Democratic field and pledges to come after the wealthy with a zealous passion.
Thats because the overwhelming consensus on Wall Street these days is that should Sanders wind up as the Democratic nominee sliding past a handful of moderates also at the top of the field he would get demolished by President Donald Trump in the general election.
Theres no Bernie fear at all, because I think the general view is that he is just way too far left of a candidate to beat Trump and a more moderate candidate would be much more competitive, said Steve Massocca of Wedbush Equity Management. If Bernie becomes the candidate and you assume Wall Street wants Trump to win again and I think they do then this is nothing but good news.
The basic message from Wall Street on Sanders: Its just way too early to freak out.
Could Bernie Sanders Win This Time Around
In the same poll, 29 percent of Democrats thought Sanders was likely to beat Trump, while only 17 percent thought Biden would a precipitous 12-point drop for Biden from the organizations post-Iowa poll and a six-point increase for Sanders. .
The change in the two men’s prospects is even more pronounced among black voters, who have been some of Bidens strongest supporters their perception of Biden as the most electable candidate fell 10 points to 21 percent, while Sanders rose nine points to 32 percent. That is especially bad for Biden considering that hes centered much of his pitch around being the safest bet against Trump a consideration many Democratic voters, particularly people of color, rank highly in their thinking.
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Can Donald Trump Run Again In 2024
Yes, Donald Trump can run for re-election in 2024.
Only Grover Cleveland has served two non-consecutive terms as president in US history, serving his first from 1885-1889 and his second from 1893-1897. Despite the fact that Trump just got the second-most votes for a presidential candidate in US history, there is one big reason why he may have an uphill climb to secure a third nomination from the Republican Party.
In June of 2024, Trump will turn 78 years old. That would make him the oldest major-party presidential candidate in US history, setting him up to be pushing 83 when his potential second term would end.
UK books currently favor Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Ivanka Trump to be the GOP nominee in 2024. Either Haley or Ivanka Trump would be the first female presidential nominee in the history of the Republican Party. Ivanka Trump would also be the first daughter of a president to receive such a nomination.
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North Carolina To Delay Results
North Carolina election officials voted unanimously to extend voting by 40 minutes on Tuesday.
The extension will also likely mean the delay of official results in the stateâs primary until 8:10 p.m. Itâs not clear whether cable news networks will announce projections or hold off until polls close.
North Carolina, which announced the delay on Twitter, had been scheduled to be the next state to close after Virginia and Vermont, at 7:30 p.m.
âJohn Fritze
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Why Sanders Would Have Defeated Trump In 2016
On Wednesday, I wrote about what Hillary Clinton said this week and what she did not say, discussing the reasons she lost the 2016 presidential election. Today, lets consider a far more interesting and important question than why Clinton lost, which is why Bernie Sanders would have won.
It is a fact that for well over a year, match-up polls showed that Sanders would have defeated Trump by substantial margins. Favorability polls have similarly and consistently showed Sanders to have substantially higher approval and favorable ratings than Trump.
While I wish Hillary Clinton had emerged this week with something more important to say than who she blamed for her loss, it is revealing that Sanders spent this week and every week since the election talking not about himself but about his vision for America.
It speaks volumes about why Sanders would have won that, on the day Trump spent celebrating a healthcare victory in the House of Representatives that will ultimately leave many Americans worse off, the president also said correctly and incredibly that the Australian single-payer healthcare system provides better healthcare for Australians than Americans have!
Perhaps after offering this accurate and enlightened view, Trump will endorse the Sanders plan to create Medicare for all Americans. Of course, Trump will not do what he said, but the huge victory for Sanders in the battle of ideas is unmistakable.
What The Data Say
There have been a number of assessments of a Sanders-Trump contest, particularly through the lens of a comparative contest between Trump and former vice president Joe Biden.
One of the more thorough was earlier this month in the Economist. In it and a supplemental Twitter thread, G. Elliott Morris argued that there are two ways in which more-moderate candidates see benefit in general election contests: by winning more swing voters and because more-partisan candidates tend to amplify turnout among the opposing party.
Morris was specifically considering the advantages Biden enjoyed, writing that Biden could perform better than his competitors against Mr. Trump. He is more moderate than Mr. Sanders, so both more likely to attract swing voters and less likely to motivate Republicans to vote against him. His strength with both black and racially conservative white voters could make a big difference in swing states.
But the corollary is clear: Perhaps Sanders ispoorly positioned against Trump.
Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster with Echelon Insights, similarly compared Biden and Sanders. Sanders fares better against Trump with younger voters, but Biden does better with other groups. There’s overlap here with ideology, obviously, since younger voters tend to be more liberal. But Sanders, he wrote, could well end up giving back some of Dems’ post-2016 white college gains.”
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And, he beat a Republican incumbent when he ran for the House in 1990, and won his 2006 Senate race by flipping a seat that had been occupied by Republicans for 144 years. Whether he could do the same at the national level when Americans’ votes have to be filtered through the insanity of the electoral college and all sorts of voter suppression is unclear, but at the very least, Sanders detractors have little evidence that hes “not electable” in places that tend to prefer more conservative representation.
Even Donald Trump has seemed impressed: In an apparent recorded conversation released by Lev Parnas legal team, the president said that he believes Hillary Clinton wouldve been tougher to beat in 2016 had she chosen Sanders as her running mate: He’s the only one I didn’t want her to pick.
Sanders supporters believe his decades-long record of fighting for social and economic justice and criticizing the corrupt political establishment will turn out people in the general election who dont habitually vote a group that skews young, poor and non-white.
And, while non-voters skew slightly more conservative than voting Democrats on social issues, they not only support single-payer healthcare at higher rates, but 51 percent also want a Democrat who will fundamentally change America. Does that sound like anyone you know?
After Strong Finishes In Iowa And New Hampshire Sanders Hopes To Win Texas
9:12 PM on Feb 14, 2020 CST
MESQUITE Bernie Sanders on Friday said he will win Texas on the strength of a multigenerational movement, and then oust President Donald Trump from the White House.
Were going to win the state of Texas,â Sanders told several thousand supporters in Mesquite. Were going to beat Trump. Were going to transform this country.
Sanders said Trump had steered the nation off course and continued to be a flawed president.
We cannot have a president who continues to be a pathological liar, Sanders said.
More than 4,000 people gathered at the Mesquite rodeo arena to hear Sanders, who is riding high after strong finishes in the early contest states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
The Texas presidential primary is March 3, and a win here could cement Sanders as the Democratic Partys front-runner for the nomination against Trump.
Sanders sought to assure voters that his progressive policies were nothing to fear. Rivals have warned that the nomination a self-described Democratic socialist against Trump would lead to certain defeat. He said that was a sign that his campaign is resonating.
The establishment is getting very nervous, Sanders said. He said that his campaign is not just about beating Trump, but taking on the Democratic Party establishment and the greed of powerful corporations what he called the âbillionaire class.
At the rally, Sanders said, this country belongs to all of us, not just the one percent.
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The social forces that propelled Sanders to the national stage in 2016 after years as an obscure voice for progress seemed to surprise even him and even more so than last time, hes running to win, not just to start a conversation.
Of course, his candidacy would never have taken off the way it did in 2016 or again in 2020 if grassroots movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter hadn’t empowered regular, working class people to talk about our political-economic system’s failure to deliver on their promises for all but a lucky few. And, more recently, the nationwide wave of teachers strikes both fed into, and was fed by, the movement behind Sanders.
Who Would Win A Trump
Sen. Bernie Sanderss victory in the Nevada caucuses Saturday will move him into the lead in the Democratic Partys presidential nominating contest. Polling from the large states that vote on Super Tuesday suggests that Sanders may soon solidify his lead, and, should he do so, he may not relinquish it.
For a number of observers, this has spurred emotional assessments of how Sanders in particular might fare against President Trump in Novembers general election. Its easy to find oneself buffeted by various analyses of where Sanders stands and whether another candidate might fare better. With that in mind, weve grouped evaluations of such a matchup with an eye toward weeding out motivated rhetoric and focusing on whats known.
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Class Politics At Scale
Our enthusiasm about a possible Sanders versus Trump contest isnt confined to the prospect that Sanders will win. How Sanders can beat Trump has enormous implications for the future of American politics.
First, we should remember a simple fact of scale, easy to forget if you follow politics as a vocation or an obsession: general elections are much, much larger than primaries.
About 31 million people voted in the 2016 Democratic primary, one of the most hotly contested nominating contests in U.S. history. Over 136 million voted in the general election. The same ratio applies to campaign spending: together, Clinton and Sanders spent about $445 million in their primary race. In the general election, Clinton and Trump spent about $1.8 billion.
Using the 2016 primary race as his platform, Sanders was able to demonstrate that radical left-wing ideas like Medicare For All, tuition-free public college, and a $15 minimum wage actually had an enormous base of support, far beyond any niche of self-defined progressives. This revelation has already left a deep imprint on the Democratic Party which has absorbed much of Sanderss program, either in fact or in rhetoric and will probably shape American politics for years to come.
A Sanders general election campaign would present an opportunity of the same kind, but on a scale roughly four times as large.
Bernie Sanders Isn’t Even My Favorite Senator Running For The 2020 Nomination But I See His Potential To Unite The Democratic Party And Oust Trump
If moderate Democrats are serious when they say their only concern is beating President Donald Trump, they should get used to the thought of backing Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
If you believe in saving democracy, the courts and the planet, and reversing the unrepentant cruelty, corruption and carelessness that define the current administration, you have a duty to at least consider the candidacy of the most popular senator in America, the top fundraiser in the Democratic primaries, and the man who has generally beaten Trump in head-to-head polls for five years now.
Sure, you cant ignore a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that shows socialism half of Sanders democratic socialist brand about as unpopular as capitalism is popular. Conventional wisdom suggests Republicans would love to run against a socialist as the stock market continually hits new highs, raising all boats that happen to float on a sea of 401s.
But every expert in conventional wisdom has one thing in common: Not one of them has ever beaten Trump.
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Biden Continues Southern Streak With A Win In Alabama
Joe Biden continued his surge in the Southern states on Tuesday, racking up another victory in Alabama after he was earlier declared the winner in North Carolina, which has 110 delegates on offer, and Virginia, which has 99 delegates.
The former vice president was forecasted for an overwhelming win Alabama, which has 52 delegates, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight. In 2016 Hillary Clinton defeated current frontrunner Sen. Bernie Sanders by more than 55 points in the Cotton State, where 54% of African Americans made up the primary electorate. Her commanding lead suggested the race was Bidenâs to lose this time around.
Biden has argued heâs the best placed Democrat to mobilize black voters at the polls, and proved his campaign strategy by winning the primary in the diverse state of South Carolina on Feb. 29. He won 48.4% of the vote and picked up 39 delegates in the Palmetto State. Sanders earned 15 delegates with 19.9% of the vote.
âCourtney Subramanian
Bernie Is The Candidate Who Can Beat Trump Heres Why
Do you want to see Donald Trump defeated in 2020? Of course you do. The candidate who is best positioned to do exactly that: Bernie Sanders.
David McNew / Getty Images
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In the race for the Democratic nomination, one figure towers above the field: the large, misshapen form of President Donald Trump. The trauma of Trumps shock victory in November 2016, and the reign of greed, brutality, and arrogance that has followed seemingly impervious to organized opposition has given Trump a special standing among Democrats.
The polls are unanimous: a healthy majority of Democratic primary voters say that it is more important to find a candidate who can beat Trump than one who they agree with on the issues. This is not a standard view for voters opposed to an incumbent president. On the eve of his 2004 re-election campaign, for instance, fewer than half of all Democrats said the same about George W. Bush.
Across the primary campaign, Bernie Sanders and many of his supporters have argued that it is not enough to defeat Trump: we need to organize to transform the abysmal economic conditions that produced Trump, too. This is all very true.
But this primary season, anxious Democrats should trust their guts. It turns out that the candidate they like best, Bernie Sanders, is also the candidate with the best chance to knock Trump out of the White House.
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