WI: Bernie Sanders ran against Obama in 2012?

Hijack has gone on far enough.

True dat.

I think the consensus is that Sanders would have lost overwhelmingly. Even if everything went wrong for Obama, he'd still be able to lean on progressive blacks.

He'd at least be able to win a few delegates, judging by how LaRouche won a delegate in 1996.
 
She was a teenager, with ill-defined views. I think much of the reason she supported Goldwater was because her parents supported him.



No. She was the First Lady of Arkansas, and an outspoken feminist. Why would she support a Republican, and a Republican who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment?
I should clarify, I meant Gene supported Reagan, not Hillary.
 
I should clarify, I meant Gene supported Reagan, not Hillary.

That's because the electorate as a whole moved left on social issues. Suddenly, his opinions became socially conservative. As such, as an economic populist and a social conservative, he became a standard Reagan Democrat.

It's absolutely ridiculous to call Hillary a social conservative, on the other hand.
 
True dat.

I think the consensus is that Sanders would have lost overwhelmingly. Even if everything went wrong for Obama, he'd still be able to lean on progressive blacks.

He'd at least be able to win a few delegates, judging by how LaRouche won a delegate in 1996.
:)
 

Quebec_Dave

Banned
I think that as a sitting senator, Sanders would have gotten around 20-30 percent of votes casts in the primaries until he dropped out. The people here claiming he'd get 5% or less are way off the mark. He isn't Lyndon Larouche in 1996. Larouche is a nut and got that vote total because he was Clinton's sole primary opponent on my state ballots. Where Larouche ran and there were two or more viable candidates, his votes totals were always below 1%.

There was anger from progressives over Obamacare not having a Public Option and other policies that were decried as neoliberal. I think Sanders would have a base of support in the party but going against a relatively incumbent in the primary squeezes his votes to that of his hardcore supporters. I think he loses Iowa 3-to-1, loses New Hampshire by around 60-40, a strong regional appeal bringing up his numbers. In the later primaries, he wins Vermont 52-48 and gets less than a third of all the votes in the other primaries up to Super Tuesday when he drops out. He is denied ballot access in New York when party leaders refuse to give him a Wilson-Pakula as Sanders is technically an independent and needs permission from the NY Democratic Party in order to be granted ballot access.

Obama, being a primaried incumbent, loses re-election narrowly to Romney as the butterflies of having to divert resources and energy to putting Sanders away leads to problems in the Obama campaign during the general. Obama wins the popular vote but loses in a whisker to Romney in the electoral college.

Sanders, blamed for the loss, becomes a pariah among Democrats in the Senate. He retires in 2014 and retires in Britain to live near his brother. Peter Welch keeps the seat in the Democratic column. It is technically a Democratic gain as sanders is a Democrat...

Romney repeals Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and other laws. The repeal of Obamacare proves unpopular as its repeal leads to millions losing coverage and the return of problems in the insurance system highlights the problems of the for-profit healthcare model. Republicans become massively unpopular and lose the 2014 midterms in a landslide.

In 2016, Obama pulls a Cleveland and is re-elected president with Kirsten Gillibrand as Vice President. Hillary Clinton is appointed Secretary of Defense.
 
I think that as a sitting senator, Sanders would have gotten around 20-30 percent of votes casts in the primaries until he dropped out. The people here claiming he'd get 5% or less are way off the mark. He isn't Lyndon Larouche in 1996. Larouche is a nut and got that vote total because he was Clinton's sole primary opponent on my state ballots. Where Larouche ran and there were two or more viable candidates, his votes totals were always below 1%.

There was anger from progressives over Obamacare not having a Public Option and other policies that were decried as neoliberal. I think Sanders would have a base of support in the party but going against a relatively incumbent in the primary squeezes his votes to that of his hardcore supporters. I think he loses Iowa 3-to-1, loses New Hampshire by around 60-40, a strong regional appeal bringing up his numbers. In the later primaries, he wins Vermont 52-48 and gets less than a third of all the votes in the other primaries up to Super Tuesday when he drops out. He is denied ballot access in New York when party leaders refuse to give him a Wilson-Pakula as Sanders is technically an independent and needs permission from the NY Democratic Party in order to be granted ballot access.

Obama, being a primaried incumbent, loses re-election narrowly to Romney as the butterflies of having to divert resources and energy to putting Sanders away leads to problems in the Obama campaign during the general. Obama wins the popular vote but loses in a whisker to Romney in the electoral college.

Sanders, blamed for the loss, becomes a pariah among Democrats in the Senate. He retires in 2014 and retires in Britain to live near his brother. Peter Welch keeps the seat in the Democratic column. It is technically a Democratic gain as sanders is a Democrat...

Romney repeals Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and other laws. The repeal of Obamacare proves unpopular as its repeal leads to millions losing coverage and the return of problems in the insurance system highlights the problems of the for-profit healthcare model. Republicans become massively unpopular and lose the 2014 midterms in a landslide.

In 2016, Obama pulls a Cleveland and is re-elected president with Kirsten Gillibrand as Vice President. Hillary Clinton is appointed Secretary of Defense.

Then you are kidding yourself. The odds are stacked heavily in favor of an incumbent president in the primaries. If he gets 10% he is getting a lot.
 
I think that as a sitting senator, Sanders would have gotten around 20-30 percent of votes casts in the primaries until he dropped out. The people here claiming he'd get 5% or less are way off the mark. He isn't Lyndon Larouche in 1996. Larouche is a nut and got that vote total because he was Clinton's sole primary opponent on my state ballots. Where Larouche ran and there were two or more viable candidates, his votes totals were always below 1%.

There was anger from progressives over Obamacare not having a Public Option and other policies that were decried as neoliberal. I think Sanders would have a base of support in the party but going against a relatively incumbent in the primary squeezes his votes to that of his hardcore supporters. I think he loses Iowa 3-to-1, loses New Hampshire by around 60-40, a strong regional appeal bringing up his numbers. In the later primaries, he wins Vermont 52-48 and gets less than a third of all the votes in the other primaries up to Super Tuesday when he drops out. He is denied ballot access in New York when party leaders refuse to give him a Wilson-Pakula as Sanders is technically an independent and needs permission from the NY Democratic Party in order to be granted ballot access.

Obama, being a primaried incumbent, loses re-election narrowly to Romney as the butterflies of having to divert resources and energy to putting Sanders away leads to problems in the Obama campaign during the general. Obama wins the popular vote but loses in a whisker to Romney in the electoral college.

Sanders, blamed for the loss, becomes a pariah among Democrats in the Senate. He retires in 2014 and retires in Britain to live near his brother. Peter Welch keeps the seat in the Democratic column. It is technically a Democratic gain as sanders is a Democrat...

Romney repeals Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and other laws. The repeal of Obamacare proves unpopular as its repeal leads to millions losing coverage and the return of problems in the insurance system highlights the problems of the for-profit healthcare model. Republicans become massively unpopular and lose the 2014 midterms in a landslide.

In 2016, Obama pulls a Cleveland and is re-elected president with Kirsten Gillibrand as Vice President. Hillary Clinton is appointed Secretary of Defense.
Sorry, but that's a pipedream. You're way overestimating the mood of the DP at the time. There was a movement to caucus "undecided" as a protest, and we got 2%. Even after 8 years, Sanders wasn't able to get anything more than a near split. In '12, 25% would be laughable.
 
I think that as a sitting senator, Sanders would have gotten around 20-30 percent of votes casts in the primaries until he dropped out. The people here claiming he'd get 5% or less are way off the mark. He isn't Lyndon Larouche in 1996. Larouche is a nut and got that vote total because he was Clinton's sole primary opponent on my state ballots. Where Larouche ran and there were two or more viable candidates, his votes totals were always below 1%.

There was anger from progressives over Obamacare not having a Public Option and other policies that were decried as neoliberal. I think Sanders would have a base of support in the party but going against a relatively incumbent in the primary squeezes his votes to that of his hardcore supporters. I think he loses Iowa 3-to-1, loses New Hampshire by around 60-40, a strong regional appeal bringing up his numbers. In the later primaries, he wins Vermont 52-48 and gets less than a third of all the votes in the other primaries up to Super Tuesday when he drops out. He is denied ballot access in New York when party leaders refuse to give him a Wilson-Pakula as Sanders is technically an independent and needs permission from the NY Democratic Party in order to be granted ballot access.

Obama, being a primaried incumbent, loses re-election narrowly to Romney as the butterflies of having to divert resources and energy to putting Sanders away leads to problems in the Obama campaign during the general. Obama wins the popular vote but loses in a whisker to Romney in the electoral college.

Sanders, blamed for the loss, becomes a pariah among Democrats in the Senate. He retires in 2014 and retires in Britain to live near his brother. Peter Welch keeps the seat in the Democratic column. It is technically a Democratic gain as sanders is a Democrat...

Romney repeals Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and other laws. The repeal of Obamacare proves unpopular as its repeal leads to millions losing coverage and the return of problems in the insurance system highlights the problems of the for-profit healthcare model. Republicans become massively unpopular and lose the 2014 midterms in a landslide.

In 2016, Obama pulls a Cleveland and is re-elected president with Kirsten Gillibrand as Vice President. Hillary Clinton is appointed Secretary of Defense.

That's not gonna happen, I'm afraid. Sanders was never gonna do that well. Even in 2016, he barely got over the forty percent mark. Against an incumbent, he's gonna poll even worse than that. Honestly, I think he'd be disqualified after Iowa because he'd poll so badly. He'd be like Bill Bradley.
 
That's not gonna happen, I'm afraid. Sanders was never gonna do that well. Even in 2016, he barely got over the forty percent mark. Against an incumbent, he's gonna poll even worse than that. Honestly, I think he'd be disqualified after Iowa because he'd poll so badly. He'd be like Bill Bradley.

And that forty percent was against a fairly unpopular candidate.
 
Sanders would have done poorly in 2012, not only because of the powers of an incumbent president but because (1) Running against the first African American president, Sanders would have done even worse among African American voters than he did in 2016 in OTL (in 2016, though doing very poorly among them in the South, he did more respectably in some northern states), and (2) Obama was (and is) more popular among millennials (Sanders' base of support in 2016) than HRC.

I do not think he would do well enough to seriously endanger the unity of the party behind Obama in November (especially since he himself would no doubt endorse Obama, and sooner in the year than he endorsed HRC in 2016). The only real question is whether his poor showing would discourage him from trying again in 2016.
 
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