[zimpenfish]

> It is quite likely, that if Democrats nominated Sanders, he would win with Trump.

I haven't seen a single political analysis which shows a path for him to do that. Do you have any examples?

[rtpg]

Massive Clintonite, but here's the way I see it:

Would Sanders have lost any state that Clinton won? Probably not.

Would Sanders have worked better in WI, Pennsylvania, Virginia? Probably.

Clinton was 77k votes from being President. Sanders might not have had as much institutional backing in the primaries, but considering that this seemed to have been decided on turnout, and Sanders had a strong grassroots following...

Basically no Clinton voter would not have voted Sanders in Sanders v Trump.

[DougN7]

Agreed. And Clinton was so unpopular on the right you would have had some Trump voters going for Sanders. I've said before that Clinton was the only politician unpopular enough to lose to Trump.

[d3ckard]

During his campaign he has paid for numerous polls to check the scenario. As far as I know, he won every one of those, which was not the case for Clinton.

I believe that it is actually highly plausible, as in my opinion the whole election was spinned to one question - "change or no change". It was damn hard for Clinton to prove she's for change, which would not be the case with Sanders.

[zimpenfish]

Given that (I think) every poll up to November had Clinton handily winning the presidency, I think we can probably take those polls with a grain of salt when it comes to "proof".

[d3ckard]

Bernie did use those polls throughout his campaign to paint himself as better oponent to Trump, so I do not believe those were without merit. His main argument then was that he wins with Trump every time while Clinton does not. We can of course discuss merit of those polls, but as I have written earlier, it fits with my view of that election and the reasons Donald Trump became POTUS. You are free to disagree of course, this is my opinion, not a fact.

[dankohn1]

The GOP had a ton of dirt on Sanders that they never used. If they had, he likely would have done much worse than Clinton. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/12/the-2016-electi...

[nicolas_t]

That was a very informative article. Thanks. I'm still not sure how bad it would have looked like compared to Hillary's email server but that article makes a good argument that Sanders wouldn't have been a guaranteed win.

[oelang]

How could that dirt be worse than what we have/had on Trump? Does it even matter?

[dankohn1]

The question (and it's obviously an Earth-2 counterfactual), is how the dirt on Sanders would have compared to the email server calumny on Clinton.

Anyway, my whole theory of the election is that since they turned on the Large Hadron Collider we've been living in one of the "bad" multiverses.