No, damn it! Quit being willfully obtuse. Why can’t you acknowledge the fact that damn near a third of the country is so disaffected by both parties’ refusal to meet their needs that they’d given up on voting at all? That’s the demographic – people clamoring for change, any change, because the status quo has failed them – that fake-populist Trump appealed to for his margin of victory, and that real-populist Bernie could’ve appealed to even better.
Bernie can’t bring out people who don’t vote. If he could, he would have won a lot more votes in Vermont.
Okay, I need you to understand something: not voting in a primary is not the same thing as not voting in the general election. That goes double for the kinds of people who are pissed off at the two-party system in general.
Do you realize how fundamentally stupid it is to respond to the argument “Bernie was capable of winning the general election precisely because he would appeal to the kinds of people who don’t vote in Democratic primaries” by saying “but if he can’t even win the primary how could he win the general election?”
I’m not talking about the primary. I’m talking about the general election we just held. There were plenty of Senators running for re-election, including Bernie.
Nearly all of those Senators won more votes than Harris. In other words nearly all won over Harris voters and won over some non-Harris voters on top of that.
But not Bernie. Unlike the other Senators, he failed to outperform Harris. So it’s clear he doesn’t have some magical power to win the votes of people who don’t vote for Democrats. Quite the opposite, in fact.
