Are voters right to believe in Bernie? While polls can only tell us so much at this juncture, the latest one from Quinnipiac University surveying all registered voters shows him doing well in a head-to-head against Trump, beating him 51-43 percent; in the same poll, Biden bests Trump 50-43 and Bloomberg does so 51-42. Sanders, however, polls the best against Trump with independents — which makes sense, as he’s the longest-serving independent member of Congress in U.S. history.
And, he beat a Republican incumbent when he ran for the House in 1990, and won his 2006 Senate race by flipping a seat that had been occupied by Republicans for 144 years. Whether he could do the same at the national level when Americans’ votes have to be filtered through the insanity of the electoral college and all sorts of voter suppression is unclear, but at the very least, Sanders’ detractors have little evidence that he’s “not electable” in places that tend to prefer more conservative representation.
Even Donald Trump has seemed impressed: In an apparent recorded conversation released by Lev Parnas’ legal team, the president said that he believes Hillary Clinton would’ve been “tougher” to beat in 2016 had she chosen Sanders as her running mate: “He’s the only one I didn’t want her to pick.”
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