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Bernie may win the primaries; the Bernie bros should start acting like it
Bernie is not the Trump of the left; some of his supporters act like he is though
So the betting markets are predicting that Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic nominee for President. Today, in the New York Times, Adam Jentleson argued that Bernie now has the clearest path of any candidate to the nomination. And both David Leonhardt of the New York Times and David French of the National Review and the Dispatch have argued that Bernie could win it all. The Bernie bros must be feeling pretty good about things now.
For my part, I am ambivalent. On the negative side, I have serious concerns about electability. Poll after poll has shown that people view socialism negatively. Sanders, of course, is a self-described socialist.
The argument made by his supporters that Bernie will bring out new voters has absolutely zero evidence to support it. Turnout for the Iowa caucuses, where higher turnout might have made the difference for Bernie, was lower than expected. In 2018, when Democrats won back the House, flipping 41 Republican seats, not a single one of those seats was flipped by a candidate embraced by the left. In the U.K., Conservative Boris Johnson trounced Labor’s Jeremy Corbin, who promised to win by turning out the…
