Can Sanders Beat Trump?

First things first. Can any Democrat beat Trump? The polls say yes, but those are popular-vote polls and we know the popular vote doesn’t decide the election. So let’s take account of the Electoral College.

Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 with 46.1% of the popular vote. Today, Feb. 13, Nate Silver, the best aggregator of polls, gives him a 44% approval rating among likely voters. And there’s another 8.2% who neither approve nor disapprove. If he got even a third of those plus the 44% approving voters, he’d have 46.7%, more than he won with last time.

And what of the 52% who disapprove? Are they all going to vote Democratic? No way. Some won’t like either candidate, so Trump could easily pick up another 2 or 3% from that group. This will be a super tough race to win.

Now to Bernie Sanders. He and his people keep pointing to polls that show he should win. But he’s never had to face attack ads from the Trump machine that is vastly more organized and better funded than it was last time.

So should we trust the intuitions and gut-feelings of the Sanders camp? Are they generally good predictors? If so, maybe we should listen to them.

Actually, they’re dreadfully bad predictors. There are two ways to see that. (1) They predicted they would clean up in the 2018 midterms, and they came in 0 for 43 in terms of flipping House seats from red to blue. (2) They predicted Jeremy Corbyn’s British Labour Party would defeat Boris Johnson — the British Trump.

Robert Borosage has been a prolific supporter of Sander for at least five years, and like many in that circle, he has been bullish on Corbyn. “Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn Might Create a Revolution,” he wrote in the Nation, April 2019, describing Jeremy Corbyn as “a British version of Bernie Sanders.” His point? “The ruling Conservative Party is disintegrating in the face of Brexit.” Yes, absolutely disintegrating.

Less than a month before the British election Borosage was still upbeat. “the [Labour] Party now offers the promise that “if it wins, things could get much better.” … “For the first time in decades, voters are being presented with a real choice on both sides of the Atlantic.” And what did the British Choose? Not the British Bernie Sanders.

At the hand of Corbyn, the Labour Party suffered its worst defeat since 1935, losing 60 seats. The Conservatives gained 48, the best they’d done since 1987, for a final score of 365 Conservative seats to 202 for Labour. 

In the 2018 midterms, the Sanderites were even more bullish. Their “Brand New Congress” PAC even promised to run 400 candidates, both Democratic and Republican, all of whom would pledge allegiance to Bernie Sanders when they won. The three Berniecrat PACs, including is own “Our Revolution” super PAC made 117 endorsements for House Candidates (see Ch. 16). Not one of them flipped a seat from red to blue. 

So we know one thing for sure. When Sanders and his followers tell us they have the best chance for beating Trump, they have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.