2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Bernie Sanders would have beaten Trump. Period. [View all]MADem
(135,425 posts)His baggage was MASSIVE. Clinton didn't use it--you think Trump would have been so circumspect? The kibbutz shit ALONE, where Joe Stalin was a figure of adulation, they sang the Internationale, and raised the Red Flag would have been milked like a mooing cow. His "honeymoon in the USSR" would have been played for all it is worth.
They'd turn his "alternative lifestyle" from "youthful indiscretion" where he was having a kid out of wedlock, sketchy on the child support, stealing electricity, and writing disturbing sexually charged what-was-that?-Fiction? into an outright assault on family values. He'd become that pervy old uncle--lock up the kids, here comes Bernie!
Then there's his wife, who, they would say, singlehandedly managed to destroy a college due to her financial malfeasance and scampered away with a huge (or is it YUUUUUGE) golden parachute.
You can say but-but-but-Trump-did-it-TOOOOOO but Trump did it in a suit. They don't look at things fairly or logically. By the time they got finished with him, you'd hate him too.
He had no ground game. NONE. He had that droning boring stump speech (I got to the point where I knew it by heart--he'd take out bits and put bits in, but they were the same damn bits, pretty much) and that's pretty much it. People were already sick to death of it by July and his crowds at his rallies reflected that.
Once Larry David started mocking him as a querulous, whining Seinfeld-type character, he was toast.
He would be painted as an aging hippie who was fixated on screwing in his youth, who never held a real job, who has only received a regular paycheck from either state or federal government.
Many "Bernie Bros" -- particularly the more aggressive types on the internet -- were actually shit-stirring Libertarians and Trump Humpers. They were getting into the Bernie Game early--as far back as the NH primary, blurring the lines and creating a "Poor White Man Can't Catch a Break" meme.
Clinton BEAT TRUMP in the popular vote. Don't forget that. Trump has no mandate. And Bernie? He never had a real shot. Not even close.