Sanders can't win

[vsrazdem]

114. Sanders voters did not cause Hillary the election.

http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/did-bernie-sanders-cost-hillary-clinton-the-presidency/
There are many proximate causes for Clinton’s loss, and I think you can divide them into three broad categories:

The Comey Letter: Perhaps the best validated of any of the causes of her loss, there are numerous proximate causes here: her decision to use a private email server, the Benghazi witch hunt, her husband’s visit with Loretta Lynch on the Phoenix airport tarmac, Lynch’s failure to stop Comey, Clinton’s willingness to keep Huma Abedin as an aide, Abedin’s willingness to stay with Anthony Weiner, Weiner’s willingness to send sexually-explicit messages to people other than his wife, Comey’s decision to send the letter to Congress, and so on.

Exogenous events: These are harder to prove, but you could make the case for any of these items outside of Clinton’s control costing her those 78,000 crucial votes: the media’s constant focus on her email server, President Obama’s failure to nominate a Supreme Court nominee that’d drive African-American or Latino turnout, people voting for third parties, the Russian disinformation campaign against her, etc.

The Clinton campaign’s own actions: the failure to seriously defend Michigan and Wisconsin, the allocation of resources to stretch states instead of the Blue Wall, the focus on personal appeal (never high for Clinton ) instead of her policy positions (more popular than Trump’s), calling half of Trump voters deplorable, focusing on data analytics and voter modeling instead of actually doing the hard work of turning the base out, generally losing a campaign where she was favored and had more resources.

Certainly all of those are more compelling proximate causes than Sanders, but is Sanders himself a proximate cause? Again, I don’t think he is unless you assume that Clinton would have had no serious primary opposition. I don’t dispute the fact that he did end up costing her some votes. And her 78,000-vote loss was certainly slim enough that it can have multiple proximate causes. I’d be willing to state that Bernie Sanders might have cost Clinton the election if no serious primary challenger emerged in the counterfactual. In Pennsylvania, Clinton would have needed around a quarter of the Sanders voters who didn’t vote for her to have changed their votes to win. How many of those people were among the 20% of Democrats who didn’t approve of Clinton before Sanders even entered the race? My guess is most of those people weren’t going to vote for Clinton anyway, but I doubt we can ever be sure.

If you’re a Clinton voter angry at Sanders, is that more compelling than any of the reasons listed above? I don’t think so. And if you want Democrats to win back the presidency in 2020, wouldn’t it make more sense to dwell on issues that had a bigger impact, and focus on the ones that you can control going forward? I could understand relitigating the 2016 primary if it had caused serious damage, but the fighting appears to be based more on rehashing old grievances than actually winning voters back into the Democratic Party. Frankly, if there’s any Democrat other than Clinton deserving of Democratic ire, it’s President Obama. It was his neglect of the DNC (he’d been told that Debbie Wasserman Schultz should be ousted as early as 2012) that led to widespread grassroots distrust of the party. It was his naiveté that Republicans would actually consider voting for Merrick Garland that prevented him from nominating an African-American or Latino nominee to the court that could’ve made the Supreme Court a bigger issue for Democrats. And it was his administration that didn’t stop the Comey Letter or publicize Russian interference in the election. If you want to start an intraparty squabble, it’s those types of mistakes that the party should seek to avoid repeating.