On the second and third issues, i.e. Bernie’s core, his promise to raise taxes on both the upper and the middle classes is the opposite of what nearly all voters want. 52 percent of Americans say taxes are too high, 42 percent say they’re about right. Only 3 percent agree with Sanders that taxes are too low. (3 percent had no opinion.) He loses on this issue 94 to 3!

In fact, you’d have to go back to Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964 to find a winning candidate who said he’d raise taxes not just on “the rich” but on pretty much everyone. A trillion dollars in new spending? This is way out of the mainstream and there is no plausible strategy for how to change that. People are not going to just “wake up” and agree with socialist political positions. They sure haven’t so far.

Finally, on question of health care, 53 percent of Americans still disapprove of Obamacare, yet Sanders wants to go even farther in the direction of big government, to a single-payer system that would require new taxes on the middle class, truly socialized medicine with fewer choices for those who can afford to make them, not to mention “death panels” and, somehow, the end of private health insurance.

Maybe these positions are good things to progressives, but they aren’t to most Americans. They’re the left-wing equivalents of Trump’s Mexican wall or Cruz’s call to abolish the IRS: they play well to the base, but alienate the middle.