Why Bernie Can Win

The pundits are wrong. Bernie Sanders is the most electable candidate this November.

....... Not only has Sanders emerged as a serious threat to capture the nomination — his victory in New Hampshire was the largest in primary history — but his impact on the shape of the campaign has been almost the opposite of what experts imagined.

.... Sanders’s ideas remain extremely popular with voters. As a result Clinton has been forced to rely more than ever on a dryly pragmatic case for her nomination: only she can defeat the Republicans in November.

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This may not be an inspiring argument. But like most forms of blackmail, it has undeniable force.

......But .......Why should we believe Clinton is more likely to defeat a Republican than Sanders?

......by a number of measures, she profiles as a comparatively weak general election candidate.

According to national polls, nearly 53 percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of Clinton, which would make her the most disliked presidential nominee in modern history. Even if incumbents are included, the only candidate with worse numbers was Jimmy Carter in 1980.

....The problem is that the loyal Democratic vote is simply not enough to win a general election. In 2012, Democrats made up only 38 percent of the general electorate, while registered independents accounted for 29 percent. On his way to defeating Mitt Romney, Barack Obama won almost half of them.

Clinton’s appeal among these non-Democratic voters is extremely limited. Just 29 percent of independents hold a favorable view of her, according to an average of three YouGov surveys taken since January; over 61 percent view her unfavorably. In the most recent poll, Clinton’s count was 24 to 67, with 50 percent saying they hold a “very unfavorable” opinion.

.... Nate Silver noted with regard to Mitt Romney’s (less pronounced) unpopularity in April 2012, we should not dismiss these early numbers either. At the very least, they make it plain that Clinton faces an image deficit greater than any challenger in recent memory, including landslide losers like Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bob Dole, and John McCain.

.... the “electability” argument skips past Clinton and concentrates on Sanders. And here the case against Sanders divides into three general paths — one, guided by historical analogy; another, driven by pundit fears and fantasies; and a third, oriented around voter ideology and demographics. None are persuasive.


Across the primary season, Sanders himself has rebuffed “electability” arguments by pointing to poll results. In hypothetical matchups against the three leading Republicans (Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio) he beats them all soundly, and polls better than Clinton in every case.

We may be skeptical about the predictive power of these findings, nine months before Election Day. But it’s wrong to call them “absolutely worthless,” as one political scientist told Vox last week.

In a comprehensive analysis of elections between 1952 and 2008, Robert Erikson and Christopher Wleizen found that matchup polls as early as April have generally produced results close to the outcome in November.

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In other words, if Sanders is the nominee, his nine-point lead over Cruz is probably safe. Even his four-point lead over Rubio likely reflects a meaningful advantage.

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That view is strongly positive. Sanders’s favorability ratio of 51 percent positive to 38 percent negative is the best of any candidate in the race, by far. His favorability with independent voters is also much higher than any of his rivals, including Clinton, Trump or Rubio.

There is simply no historical precedent for a major party nominee as popular and well-known as Sanders collapsing in a general election.

(lots of good analysis in the actual article; these are just sniippets)

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/02/21/why-bernie-can-win