Would Sanders have truly done as badly as Clinton in an election against Trump?

Maybe. Many Clinton supporters don’t seem like they would be an automatic supporter for a self-proclaimed Socialist.

No I do not and here is why. Both were on solid ground with Liberal voters. IMO it was a coin toss between the two and who ever won that coin toss IMO would have carried the others’ voters. But because of WikiLeaks exposing the DNC and the fix that stole the primary election from voters, I truly believe there were Sanders voters that did not vote for Hillary because of that and more than likely voted Stein or that other guy. Then add in Comey in the final stretch re-opening the investigation into Hillary’s server fiasco, that was the spear in her back IMO that took her down.

Had Sanders been the candidate he would have looked lily white compared to Donald. People including myself voted for Donald holding our noses because the stench from Hillary was far greater.

Hillary was Velcro for the “throw the bums out, drain the swamp” anti-establishment message of the Trump movement. Sanders could have been more like Teflon to that message. I was open to the possibility of voting for Sanders but he never got the chance to go toe to toe with the Donald to sway my vote.

@Cruiser But because of WikiLeaks exposing the DNC and the fix that stole the primary election from voters, I truly believe there were Sanders voters that did not vote for Hillary because of that and more than likely voted Stein or that other guy.
If there was no perceived (real or imagined) bias by the party of Twiddle Dee to rig the election in her favor by appearing to not support Sanders in the least, even Christian media, and he won it out right, those who voted 3rd party etc. would they not have voted for him even along party lines? What smut would WikiLeaks have on him to take the starch from his sails in the waning campaign days?

People including myself voted for Donald holding our noses because the stench from Hillary was far greater.
LOL LOL LOL I had to laugh over that, it was almost my election experience to a tee, not quite enough to glean an Atta boy out of me, but damn close. LOL

Your question’s grammar has issues.

Sanders would have won, as demonstrated by polls before during and after.

Sanders is awesome. Honest, benevolent, anti-corruption, pro-planet, experienced, etc.

And people like him. See this, which was even before the worst of the reasons not to vote Clinton or Trump had piled up:
http://i.imgur.com/YRdaNIV.jpg

Trump is probably the most unpopular and least liked President-elect in US political history.

The contest was between two of the most unpopular candidates in electoral history, with absolutely terrible approval ratings.

Trump won fewer votes than Romney did in 2012.

Of course Sanders would have won. He had positive ratings, was viewed as having integrity and principles, and was popular with the very demographic group that swung significantly toward Trump—the poorer white working class.

And there’s no point mourning what could have been. There’s a chance for the Democrats to reform and adopt the sort of left-wing populism of Sanders—it’s the only hope there is of countering the right-wing narratives.

Sanders would have crushed Trump. Trump to Sanders: “You’re a Socialist!”, Sanders response: “I am, and let me tell you why that’s a good thing…” The only point that Trump could have attacked him was the socialism angle, and that ends up being an opportunity for Sanders to sell his ideas, which it turns out the American people agree with (Americans love Medicare and Social Security).

Clinton lost to the candidate with the highest disapproval ratings in the history of any US presidential election. She lost to a guy who probably molested children and had an audio clip of him bragging about sexually assaulting women. She lost to a guy who is a failed businessman that is so Orange, an Oompa-loompa would blush at the sight of him. And despite a minor advantage in the popular vote, Clinton got absolutely decimated in the electoral college to a facist, racist, piece of shit. In my book, that makes her the worst Presidential candidate in US history.

I disagree a bit with @Kropotkin in the sense that I think doing a thorough post-mortem is incredibly valuable for preventing a colossal fuck-up of this magnitude from ever happening again. Many of the people responsible for this catastrophe, those who helped tip the scales for Clinton, or who supported her despite the warning from Bernie supporters that she was a bad choice, are now trying to blame the wrong causes.

If we don’t learn the right lessons from this now we’re going to have 8 years of Trump instead of 4.

Sanders would have won the general election. I voted for him in the primary, and I’m pissed that the DNC screwed him over the way they did. He probably felt like a “dangerous” candidate to them, but I think they underestimated how disliked Clinton is.

@gorillapaws Oh sure. I didn’t mean that one shouldn’t analyse the causes.

The usual culprit when people don’t realise that a preferred candidate is actually bad—is groupthink.

When right-wingers go on about “out of touch liberal elites”—I think they’re actually fairly on the mark, and were in this case. It’s clear that a coterie of establishment Democrats foisted Hillary on the electorate, because they liked her, and liked the idea of setting another landmark of a first female President after the first African-American one—and convinced themselves that there were enough people out there who would think the same way.

It didn’t matter how poorly she was polling nationally, and how far into the negatives her ratings were. Negative feedback was brushed off. Suggestions that she was a weak candidate and could potentially lose were laughed off or ignored. It was full steam ahead aboard the SS Hillary.

And then there was the genius strategy of using media connections to promote Trump and get him air time during the primaries, in the belief that he was the weakest Republican candidate and the one that would make Hillary a shoo-in. Well, he was the weakest—except that no one factored in how bad their own campaign and Hillary were, and have since handed over the White House to a narcissist with delusions of competence.

I imagine Sanders absolutely horrified them too. I’ve seen a similar thing here in the UK with the Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn—who is in many ways a Sanders-like figure. And he horrifies the establishment “left”, and gets attacked by his own party almost as much as he does by the right-wing.

Hillary could have won the Presidency quite easily had she picked a better running-mate too, rather than yet another dour, establishment, corporate politician. Picking Sanders would have been enough. But they’re so used to succeeding with the sort of neoliberal, pro-corporate duplicitious politics of saying one thing to the public, and another to donors and lobbyists—that they’re incapable of doing anything differently, and think anything different is bound to lose.

They also won’t learn, because the attributional bias is already clear. It’s all someone else’s fault. It’s the fault of Jill Stein for running. It’s the fault of Sanders for ever challenging. It’s the fault of the electorate for being racists, or stupid. It’s the fault of the FBI. It’s the fault of Wikileaks. And on and on.

Clinton won the popular vote, so she didn’t do that bad. More people voted for her than for you god.

But yeah, I think Sanders would have stood better chances of bagging the electoral college.

@Kropotkin Well said. And you’re right that it’s not about dwelling on what could have been, but more about learning and moving forward. One point I might add is that many in the establishment were incentivized to support Clinton because it was in their own financial interest. If the party went in the populist direction, rejecting corporate money, then all of those juicy lobbying positions they were looking forward to would go away. In other words, to insiders in the Democratic Party, a Sanders Presidency was just as bad for them as a Trump presidency as far as their political futures were concerned.

@olivier5 Yeah, Clinton BARELY won the popular vote. That’s fucking embarrassing given how horrible her opponent was. She did do “that bad.” It’s really important for people to understand this or liberals are going to keep losing elections. The people are sick of the status quo. They’re tired of politicians saying shit like “I’m for American women” and then voting for the bankruptcy bill, or trying to pass trade deals that kill their jobs because they’re getting paid off millions of dollars. People like me get nauseated when we her Clinton talk about how she’s for the environment and then we read emails discussing her promoting fracking around the world—again after taking in millions of dollars. Clinton and that mentality is the cancer of corruption that has infected the Democratic leadership.

@gorillapaws She won the popular vote by a wide margin, still unknown precisely (only in America do they find it so hard to tally votes – tells you something about how much people’s vote does not count) but in the area of one million votes. That’s no “barely”. Get your facts straight. And her opponent was seen as bad by DEMS, but obviously not seen as bad by the many people who voted for him, so the idea that she lost to a “bad candidate” is flimsy.

There is no certainty that Sanders would have won. There’s good reason to believe he would have done better than Clinton, that’s all.

I agree with you by and large but i see no need to demonize Clinton or throw endless fits of rage at her. She’s only the symptom of a broader systemic problem: paid-for politics. Almost all US congressmen/women are the same: elected and paid by the lobbies. And Trump is a lobby in and by himself. His election is the zenith of paid-for politics.

1% margin is barely in my book.

In practice, most general elections end up with similar results, with a 1 or 2% difference between the winner’s and the loser’s votes. A difference of 1 million votes is twice as much as the margin of Al Gore to George Bush in 2000.

Sanders would have done better than Clinton, but I still have some reservations about him. He has a blustery style that puts me off. I think that if Elizabeth Warren had run, she would have easily defeated Trump. She is a dynamic speaker with an impressive record for her short time in the Senate.

Warren 2020.

@olivier5 When you say she’s a symptom, that makes it sound like she’s a victim. The Clintons are some of the main causes for why the party is as corrupt as it is. Obama beat McCain 52.93% to 45.65%, and he beat Romney 51.1% to 47.2%. A 1% margin is razor thin.

I think it incredibly important to demonize Clinton. Her supporters rigged the primary, and then they lost to Trump. Clinton and her supporters are the reason we have 4 years of trump. I’ve seen article after article trying to put the blame on Sanders, Jill Stein (who I voted for), Wikileaks, the FBI. The reality is that ordinary Democrat voters are sick of the Democratic Party selling them out. If the party continues down the pro-corporate neoliberal path, we’re going to have 8 years of Trump. They’re already trying to do this by putting Chuck “Wall Street” Schumer as minority leader of the Senate and lobbyist Howard Dean as the DNC chair.

A symptom is not the same thing as a victim. A sympton is a manifestation of some root problem which, if treated, won’t make the root problem disappear. E.g. you can yell at Clinton until you are blue in the face; you can even put her in jail like Trump wants to, and it’s not going to achieve anything in terms of reforming the democratic party.