• rayyy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    He should have been president.

    Hands down. He had the populist vote of independents and many Republicans too. The right of center DNC torpedoed him. They weren’t going to allow a center left candidate through. Wasn’t the first time either. At the 1944 Democratic National Convention, conservative party leaders defeated a very popular Henry Wallace’s bid for renomination. I canceled all donations to the DNC and became an Independent.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      He had the populist vote of independents and many Republicans too.

      To put a finer point on it: he had the margin of victory over Trump that Clinton did not, and it came from precisely the sorts of people who don’t vote in Democratic Party primaries (which is why the “but he couldn’t even win the primary” rebuttal is nothing but dishonest horseshit).

      • voidMainVoid@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        “but he couldn’t even win the primary”

        TBH that says a lot more about the Democrats than it does about him.

        • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Not really. It benefited Republicans to not attack Bernie to make Clinton look worse. Had Bernie won that would have changed. They had a ton to attack him on, and we’ll never know how well it would have worked. The kind of bullshit they got people to believe about Clinton was insane. I still hear some of it today.

      • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        This makes me laugh. You all whine about how unfair the DNC, the Media, centrists Democrats were to Bernie, and that caused him to lose the Primary. But you assume had he won the Primary that the Republican Party and Donald Trump would not have made all of that look like absolute childs play? If you can’t defend yourself against the DNC and CNN, you’re fucked when you go up against people that will just straight up lie about you. Using polls from when the GOP hadn’t said anything about Bernie is pointless. It was to their advantage to act like Bernie was perfect, it hurt Clinton.

      • prole@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Ummm hi… I enthusiastically supported Bernie in the primary, and then voted for Hillary in the general. Because Bernie lost the primary.

        You may have your anecdotal evidence, but my experience has been the opposite. That the people who complain the most about Bernie losing, are people who did not vote in the Democratic primary.

        The primary is the time for progressives (and young people, who are notorious for not showing up to vote in anything but the general, if they vote at all) to vote for progressive candidates.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The primary is the time for progressives

          Who the fuck is talking about progressives? We’re talking about all the other people who liked Bernie better than Trump, but who otherwise tended to like Republicans better than Biden. Specifically, the people who liked Bernie for his anti-authoritarianism and who held their noses for the leftist stuff. They can’t vote in a Democratic primary because they’re too busy voting in the Republican or maybe even the Libertarian one instead!

          More concretely: they couldn’t vote for Bernie because they were too busy voting for (probably) John Kasich.

          • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            the people who liked Bernie for his anti-authoritarianism and who held their noses for the leftist stuff.

            You know… Morons. Privileged assholes.