Even his own party never votes for his stuff because his ideas are always terrible. They are always emotional, but he never thinks them through. I don't think he's able to think them through.
I'll give you an example from a different person: There's someone on Twitter who wants a 0.1% tax on stock transactions, and then he calculates that this little change will fund everything we could possibly want. He utterly ignores that if you put this tax people will change their behavior! There will be fewer transactions, and this tax will fund nothing at all.
Sanders is the same way: He makes an idea, and completely ignores how people will respond to it.
Sanders has a 0% chance of winning.
Even for the Trump "bull in the china shop" voter, Sanders has become less relevant in 2020 and 2024 because he offers so little and for someone so called principled, he doesn’t hold the same ideas on immigration that he has before.
I know many Trump supporters but not a single one of them respects or like Sanders, and all the polling data I can find points out that this is the general trend.
Any Sanders path to victory involved massive amounts of youth turnout that would have otherwise stayed home, and there's basically zero Republican leaning voters that would switch to Bernie. And the swing vote swings massively to Trump when Sanders goes against Trump.
People need to be treated as adults before they can be expected to act like adults. There's always the risk that goes wrong, it has in the past, but we're doomed if we believe the only way forward is a small group of elites forcing change on us because they "know best".
Reasoned, informed votes aren’t a major factor in elections.
[edit] see if your library has a copy of Democracy for Realists and also dig into older major works they cite, if you’re interested in more on this. For a quick gut-check, look up the proportion of US voters that understand how marginal income tax rates work, then reflect on the fact that this is something very simple that directly affects them in ways they must confront at least once per year, and despair at how bad similar measures must look for practically everything else and that if they don’t understand the basics of how things work, they can’t even begin to figure out “what’s best” for them or for anyone else.
I wouldn't expect voters for either candidate to agree with much from the other candidate, but maybe I don't know their platforms well enough to see the similarities.
Given the GP comment I assumed we weren't talking about that scenario where people are only a candidate or party voter.
> Trump _is_ the policy and the view.
That may be true for voters, I know quite a few Trump voters that only care to vote for him and couldn't explain any coherent policy reason for preferring him. That has no bearing on Trump's own policies or views though.
This immediately got dismissed. "Everything is fine". It is a mistake to paint all Trump voters as just being proto-fascists (which the majority are). Many ended up there because they desperately wanted change and establishment candidates were just offering more of the same. Hilary absolutely was a "more of the same" candidate. And the entire GOP primary field (21 at one point) were "more of the same". That's why Trump won the primary. That, combined with Hilary's massive negatives and her generally being a terrible candidate, were why Trump won in the first place.
2020 was an anomaly in many ways. We had Covid lockdowns and were coming off 4 years of Trump chaos. Because of the lockdown, voting was made substantially easier with early voting and mail-in ballots. The more people vote, the more Democrats win. It's why voter suppression is a key part of the Republican platform (make no mistake, "voter ID" is simply voter suppression). Were it not for the pandemic, I very much suspect Trump would've won re-election. Biden was a terrible candidate and never should've been the nominee. Clyburn basically handed him the nomination (in South Carolina) and Warren stayed in long enough to split Bernie's vote, the second time the DNC had actively sabotaged Bernie's campaign.
Remember in 2020, Bernie had Joe Rogan's endorsement.
The Democrats are really just Republican Lite now. Kamala's immigration plan was Trump's 2020 immigration plan. Kamala abandoned opposition to the death penalty from the party platform and called for the most "lethal" military. She courted never Trumpers like Liz Cheney. Like seriously, who was that for? She refused to separate herself from Biden on any issue despite his historic unpopularity. And of course, she refused to deviate from the deeply unpopular position on Israel-Gaza. In short, she offered the voters absolutely nothing.
In this election, progressive voter initiatives outperformed the Democratic party by a massive margin. For example, minimum wage increases passed in Missouri, a state Trump won by 22. Trump won Florida by 14 yet recreational cannabis and abortion protection got 55-59% of the vote (unfortunately, you need 60% to pass in Florida).
The Democratic Party exists to actively sabotage any progressive momentum. We didn't get a convention primary after Biden withdrew because the DNC was scared a progressive candidate would win. They stuck us with Kamala to avoid that.
My point here is that Trump doesn't have and has never had a majority. He only won each time because there was effectively zero opposition. A chunk of Trump's base are simply people desperate for change. At least Trump lied to them and gave them something to vote for. Democrats wouldn't even lie to them and tell them they were going to fix housing and egg prices and give them healthcare.
This is a solid summary of what happened during the political shifting of the last (almost) ten years.
Unfortunate that this comment is so deep in the thread here.
I have often felt that the only way to break this cycle is to get more non-voters to join the fray. There are enough people totally checked out but get a bunch of them and you can make up for the centrist dems. Its gotta be a celebrity that has any chance of ramming through the Democratic primary just like Trump did. AOC isn't going to cut it. If we make it to 2028, We need a superstar.
This is the real bisector. If one party gets to use magic and capture the stupid vote, what's the other party supposed to do? Lie more? Lie less? As long as magic appeals to stupid people, we're screwed.
The real underlying problem is the collapse of the consensus of the elites, projected through corporate media. Murdoch saw a financial opportunity to break from this model, and social media companies followed with this as their only business model. Murdoch and Zuckerberg make money spreading magic which appeals to stupid people who vote in deranged morons. There is no effective feedback mechanism because not enough voters have the mental skills to evaluate the consequences of their actions. Or perhaps they just like seeing chaos and destruction. Rinse repeat.
1: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-pri...
Thats more than enough of a margin for a definite loss. Image if Trump lost in 2016. His supporters and the whole world wide right wing ecosphere would never had gotten emboldened.\
The article doesn't touch upon it but there was a contagion of two time Obama voters that voted Trump. This group was touched upon in Michael Moores documentary Farenheit 11/9. People like those in Flint, MI who felt abandoned by Obama switched their allegiance to Trump.
