One of the arguments used by supporters of Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders is that she has a better chance of beating the Republican candidate in November. But there has been little empirical support for such a belief. Now a new Quinnipiac polls says that Sanders would beat every Republican candidate while Clinton only ties or trails them.
American voters back Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont over Republican candidates by margins of 4 to 10 percentage points in head to head presidential matchups, according to a Quinnipiac University National poll released today. The closest Republican contender is Ohio Gov. John Kasich who trails Sanders 45 – 41 percent.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton trails or ties leading Republicans in the November face-off, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University Poll finds.
…Sanders’ leads among key independent voters range from 45 – 35 percent over Kasich to 52 – 33 percent over Cruz. By comparison, Clinton’s best score among independent voters is 42 percent to Trump’s 40 percent.
Sanders’ leads among women range from 9 to 16 percentage points. Men are generally divided except in the Sanders-Bush matchup where the Democrat leads by 6 percentage points.
Clinton’s leads among women range from a tie to a 9-percentage point edge over Trump. Men vote anyone but Clinton by margins of 8 to 16 percentage points.
The broad appeal of Sanders has been quite obvious for some time, except for the professional pundit class that refuses to acknowledge that political stances outside of their preferred narrow pro-oligarchy spectrum can command a mass following.
outside of their preferred narrow pro-oligarchy spectrum
He’s not outside of the pro-oligarchy spectrum. He’s just closer to the edge of it. Considering that his opponents are all oligarchs I can understand why he looks like an outsider.
I’d actually vote for him, just as my way of saying “fuck the system.” I’d normally say I’d vote for Trump, too, for the same reason — I am very sick of the 2 party bullshitshow and Trump is setting it back on its heels a bit. On the other hand, I’m afraid he may be the last clown standing.
@1 He’s not pro-oligarchy at all, though he’s not really a socialist either. He’s a Keynesian Capitalist and a New (Better?) Deal Democrat.
The problem with the comparison is that the Republican attack machine has focused on Clinton and basically ignored Sanders so far. That will change instantly if he actually gets the nomination.
(This doesn’t mean that Sanders is necessarily unelectable. It does mean that he SHOULD be running better against individual Republican candidates at this point regardless of whether he is more electable or less electable than Clinton in an actual general election campaign.)
(Clinton would also be expected to be trailing most of the individual Republican candidates at this point as she’s been under constant Republican fire and hasn’t been able to do tailored counterattacks because she doesn’t know who her opponent will be.)
@2 Well, the sort of critique people like Sanders gets from people on his left is that his methods doesn’t destroy class but merely makes it bearable. In that view, he’s pro-sustainable oligarchy and is in some ways even worse than the oligarchs themselves because at least the oligarchs will keep the class struggle alive.
But that’s not the sort of conversation one sees in the US most of the time, I’d imagine.
I mean he does rail against class as far as the justice system is concerned. That’s not minor at all.
The Democrats run a huge risk of losing this if it’s Clinton vs. Trump. The main reason is that 2016 seems to be the Year Of The Populist. If Team Hillary can’t get women motivated to vote on election day it’s hard to see her besting Trump.
@Michael I, 3:
The Republican attack machine hasn’t even gotten started on Sanders or Clinton. So far all their efforts have been concentrated on Trump, and we know how that’s going for them. And Trump so far has concentrated his fire on, in turn, Bush, Fiorina, Carson and Cruz. He hasn’t gotten started on the Democrats either.
When the Trump attack machine turns its attention on the Democrats… they’ll know.
“Trump attack machine”? That makes it sound like he’s in charge of some kind of organized, multi-level media campaign, where he can give the word and get hordes of scribes and pundits to subtly reinforce his messages.
That’s exactly what we’ve always seen from the Koch brothers, but not what we’re seeing from Trump at all. All I’m seeing is a guy who likes to go on talk shows and call other people poopyheads.
Short of pushing through a constitutional amendment to restructure the way power is manifest in this system nothing is going to change. Third parties are at a huge disadvantage. Last major change was in 1860s with the creation of the Republican party and things have become much more ossified and entrenched since then.
In the end Bernie is going to be like an ex-roommate I had. He would would come home in the evening and the house would be in the 90s. So he would turn on the AC. Fair enough but he would set the thermostat down to 50F thinking that, like the gas pedal on a car, the harder you push the harder it will work and the faster it will cool. Most thermostats don’t work that way. This AC system was a single-stage design that is either off or on, calling or satisfied. It only cooled at one speed, no matter how low you set the thermostat.
Bernie thinks that the political system will change faster if you just get more enthusiasm, set the thermostat to a more extreme setting. It doesn’t work that way. Only a third of the house and senate can be up for election at one time. The system is only going to work as fast as designed, and no amount of passion, enthusiasm, and voter participation can change that.
As it was with my idiot roomie, pushing the setting harder trying to get the system to work faster than it is designed has consequences. In that case, he set it at 50F while we were away for two weeks with nobody home. The power bill, with outside temperatures in the high 90s, generally poor insulation, and the AC struggling 24 hours a day to keep the inside cold enough to hang meat, was Yuuuuge. Fortunately, a matter of favorable timing, I was off the rental agreement by then and missed the epic fight over who would pay the power bill and the cost to replace the AC system, the compressor took out the evaporator coils and lines, after it gave up.
On the political side Bernie promising radical change that he will never be able to deliver, he won’t have the votes in congress to pass anything, will lead to a whole generation of first-time Progressive voters turned off of voting forever. Youthful enthusiasms are vulnerable to any lack of performance and disappointment.
Note that this is is exactly the dynamic that provided a constituency of disappointed and disaffected voters within the GOP base for the Koch brothers to exploit and form the Tea Party from. For years the GOP had played the game of promising conservative red meat while serving a thin gruel of marginal partisan advance.
Will we see a liberal version of the Tea Party in two or four years?