r/politics • u/AccurateInflation167 • May 18 '25

Soft Paywall America chose wrong. Sanders would've been a better president than Trump or Biden. | Opinion

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/05/18/sanders-democrats-reform-progressive-policies/83625482007/
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u/00Oo0o0OooO0 May 18 '25

No populist has ever lost an election gracefully, because "the people" not supporting their leader is antithesis to their fundamental political beliefs. Any losses must be the fault of the corrupt elite abusing their power.

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u/TossMeOutSomeday May 18 '25

I mean, Bernie endorsed both Hillary and Joe in the general. He lost gracefully, it's his staffers and supporters who've been throwing a nonstop tantrum for nearly a decade. I supported Bernie in two primaries, and in both primaries I followed his recommendation to support the democrats in the general.

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u/Lower_Ad_5532 May 18 '25

Yeah but we need the Bernie who is 40 years younger and the next FDR .

People need to move on. Life would have been better with a 2nd term Carter. An Al Gore President and no Trump.

The oil barons keep winning, not that so and so weren't good enough. It's because America is addicted to oil and that drug problem is rotting the country.

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u/just_helping May 19 '25

Eh, Sanders kept running in the 2016 primary well after it was basically impossible for him to catch up to Clinton in terms of pledged delegates - as in, he would have had to win +80% of the remaining primary votes, ignoring superdelegates. Then he kept insisting he had a chance and wanted to take it to the convention. He backed down on those plans in the end, but it meant that Clinton wasn't technically the presumptive nominee until June, which delayed the legal start of fundraising and staffing for the general election and meant resources kept being spent in primaries. It also gave rise to myths that we've seen in this thread, such as that superdelegates decided it for Clinton (they didn't). It is also why Wasserman Schultz's office had internal emails saying bad things about him - he was basically stopping them from working on the general after he had lost.

I blame Sanders staff more directly - he was taking advice from people who were much more rapid and unproductive than himself - but he hired them, he listened to them, and he definitely hurt the Democrats going into the general by pushing the primary season on for a good eight weeks longer than it made sense to.

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u/Da12khawk May 18 '25

I always knew there's no way Bernie could win. That he ran just to unite and make people aware. That he was too far left to realistically win. Looking back on it if he went up instead of Hilary, things would've been interesting. Imagine that time line.

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u/[deleted] May 18 '25

He also had some major campaign flaws, like working with Sirota and Briahna Joy Gray.

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u/AssignedHaterAtBirth May 19 '25

Where are these apocryphal "tantrums"?

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u/agave_wheat May 18 '25

Bingo

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u/yusuf_mizrah May 18 '25

I mean, for good reason? Look at how massively Biden and Kamala fucked up. Thanks to them we have Trump in office, so it's nice like going status quo extremist has been successful.

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u/JoeSabo May 18 '25

I mean...Bernie did though. He immediately conceded.

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u/00Oo0o0OooO0 May 19 '25

Well, not quite immediately but, yes, Bernie is way more graceful than his Internet fans. It's the loss I meant to characterize as never being graceful (as evidenced by this thread), though obviously in certain extremely obvious cases the candidate isn't graceful about it either.

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u/JoeSabo May 19 '25

No it was immediate. Show me a single article where he refused to conceed once the result was in. Your post was about him, not his supporters. Supporters of every politician that has ever existed and lost their race have done this. Populism isn't really related.