There's not any evidence behind the people who say that Bernie can't win. He does the same as the others in the matchup polls. His policies poll very well. And most of the columnists who say that are people like Jennifer Rubin, a Republican, who hates Bernie's policies and wants to prevent him from being president.

There's no way to know exactly who is the most electable, but there's no reason to think Bloomberg would be more than Bernie. In 2016, everyone said the socialist couldn't win and we needed a moderate. We went with the moderate and now we have Trump. We need to learn the lesson now and nominate a progressive that will drive turnout. Trump is an existential threat. We can't afford to nominate another centrist and lose and wait until 2024 to learn the lesson that we need a candidate who will excite the base.

There's really no evidence that supports it and some that dispels it.

Had it been true, Sanders would have likely much done better in 2016. He did well among young voters, certainly, but they didn't show up in the numbers everyone seemed to be promising.

This cycle, we're hearing similar claims, but his claim about young voter turnout in Iowa turned out to be false.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/sanders-spins-young-voter-turnout-in-iowa/

We've been hearing similar claims for the past five years and they really haven't materialized. Meanwhile, turnout of young voters in 2018 was up significantly, and Sanders wasn't even running.

More likely, young voters are going to the polls more often for reasons other than Sanders. Climate change, health care, gun control, etc. If that's the case, the advantage may not be as large for Sanders as many insist.

Young voters are not spending all night in a caucus


Young voters did come out more in NH

Youth vote was way up in 2018 over 2016. If they didn't show up for Sanders in 2016, but showed up in 2018 to vote for Democrats in the blue wave, there's no evidence it was because of Sanders.

The increase in youth vote now could be a continuation of the blue wave as it is in other groups. Turnout among all groups was higher in NH, not just the young.

The data says otherwise, unless you don't consider Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Johnstown and Scranton labor towns.

https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/here-are-all-of-donald-trump-s-and-hillary-clinton/article_17eda882-a367-11e6-8367-fb4571a4487f.html

last two states this primary. His numbers show him weak.

Copying from another post of mine:

-----

I wrote about this in my post in the thread at https://www.democraticunderground.com/1287486770

The OP had quoted from an article that said:

And in my agreement, I expanded on it this way:

We really don't know which group gets us more votes. Biden {or your moderate of choice} and Sanders (i.e. our two extremes) would both get the vote of virtually every true Dem (certainly when the alternative is Trump). But beyond that, what gets us more votes... appealing to the moderate middle and "reasonable" Republicans? or appealing to the more extreme left partisans and the anti-establishment outsiders who want to shake things up? In 2016, we attempted to appeal to the moderate middle, while Trump went for the highly partisan and anti-establishment group. We lost that one. Something to think about.

Clinton got 3 million more votes than Trump. If appealing to a higher number of votes is what you're calling for, then Clinton fit the bill.

The problem is: the number of votes is irrelevant. Where those votes come from is what matters. The election will be decided in a handful of states, and it's the match-ups in those states that we should be considering.

It's possible that with the alternative strategy ("appealing to the more extreme left partisans and the anti-establishment outsiders who want to shake things up" rather than looking to get our winning margin from "the moderate middle and 'reasonable' Republicans&quot might have won us the votes we needed where we needed them.

In the absence of any vetting by the GOP, we have no clue how Sanders would have done in the GE. He lost the nomination pretty decisively, and anything beyond that is just conjecture.

"appealing to the more extreme left partisans and the anti-establishment outsiders who want to shake things up"

That group is a small fraction of the electorate and pandering to small groups at the expense of the others is not usually a winning strategy. They also should have understood like the rest of us that Trump was an existential threat and acted accordingly.

We don't know that! That's the point of my post #8 and the 0riginal article I was referencing.

re: "And there's zero evidence that Sanders would have done better" {in getting the votes where we needed them}.

The evidence may not be conclusive, but it ain't zero either. As has been posted here recently, we lost MI/WI/PA by less than the number of Sanders supporters who voted for someone else in those states (presumably consisting mostly of non-Dems... the independents, the anti-establishment types). I think we still would have gotten the Dem vote we got (do you really think lots of Hillary voters would have taken Trump or some other candidate over Sanders?), but we also would have gotten those "defectors." So yeah, we'll never know for sure, but the evidence is not zero, when you look at the numbers and how the different groups of people voted.