"But Sanders hasn't been attacked by Republicans yet!"
Yes, he may be polling stronger against all of the Republican candidates for President than Hillary Clinton does, but wait until the Republicans attack him. Yes, Sanders may have the highest favorability ratings of any major candidate for President, but you know, Republicans haven't attacked him yet. Yes, Sanders appeals strongly to Political Independents, who are more numerous than either Democrats or Republicans, but only because so far the latter haven't attacked him. Yes, the Presidential campaign has been going on now for almost a year, and the more the public finds out about Bernie Sanders the more they tend to like him, but just wait for those Republicans attacks. The fact that Bernie's won hundreds of thousands more youth votes than Hillary and Trump combined so far means nothing before Republican attacks. And the fact that Sanders wins sky high approval ratings from the voters in his home state where he repeatedly wins easy reelection, well that's only because Republicans there have never attac... umm, scratch that last one - everyone knows that Vermont doesn't really count.
Sanders hasn't been attacked by the Republicans yet? Oh, really? Bernie Sanders has spent his entire political career to the left of the Democratic Party. It's not exactly a secret. And the mainstream media was positively gleeful about introducing Bernie Sanders to those Americans who didn't already know him as "the Socialist Senator from Vermont." Bernie Sanders is the living breathing representation of the Republican sponsored Red Scare that's run nonstop for the last half century, that cat is already out of the bag, and you know what? Bernie doesn't scare anyone except the Super Rich.
If the Presidential election were held today in the neon red state of Utah, UTAH, Sanders would beat Trump there by double digits, while Clinton would be locked in a statistical tie. Bernie doesn't have sex scandals, he doesn't have money scandals, and he can't be ridiculed as a flip flopper because he's been so damned consistent for so damned long. You can't catch Sanders saying one thing to voters and another to his financial backers, because they are actually one and the same, and Bernie proudly says the same thing to everyone. He spins about as much as a Pre Global Warming glacier. AND Bernie opposed the Iraq War, damned straight he did.
But he'll melt when Republicans attack him. Uh huh.
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I was 
Really?
You know what many of them remind me of? How the establishment Republicans stayed in a terminal state of denial over Trumps's strong appeal to voters during an anti-establishment election year. You can change just a few phrases and it is identical: "Wait until the voters finally see the hit ads that reveal that Donald Trump really isn't a Conservative, boy will they reject him then!". Or "Voters will never embrace a candidate who dissed a war hero, wait till voters learn about that!" That is classic fallacy of outdated conventional wisdom. The real truth was staring them in the face all along but they just couldn't see it - because it went against their well memorized script.
In 1992 a young guy from the small state of Arkansas, who had traveled to the Soviet Union, who many voters felt had dodged the draft, who both admitted use of drugs AND got pegged as dishonest for how he did it ("but I didn't inhale"
defeated a sitting U.S. President who was a bona fide war hero. THAT WAS 24 YEARS AGO PEOPLE. Yes there will be voters turned off by Sanders being a "scary socialist", but how many of them are a lost cause for any Democratic candidate to begin with? Every election cycle more and more of those types literally "die off".
Meanwhile how many voters will ultimately embrace the candidate who they believe "cares about people like me me"? Wake u and smell the coffee. Sanders is a fighter and people like that in a leader, especially someone who they authentically believe plans to fight for them. Here is the dirty little secret of American politics. Establishment politicians on both sides don't want to debate about class inequities because it doesn't play out in their favor to do so. Fortunately for them they almost always get to run against each other so they don't have to. They scare away true economic populists by denying them funding and air time. And they have trained most everyone to act like "liberal" is a dirty word that makes candidates uncomfortable to be associated with.
None of that crap works with Bernie Sanders. When they attack Bernie on economics he fights back and forces them to defend the status quo if they can. And they can't. Sanders doesn't need establishment money, and as our candidate for President they can't keep him from being heard. It's not the backing of traditional progressive voters who time and time again allow Bernie Sanders to outperform Hillary Clinton in match ups against Republicans. It is ordinary Americans who are fed up with being taken for granted and screwed.
