Bernie teria ganho?

Bernie Sanders Would Have Lost the Election in a Landslide, por Kevin Drum (Mother Jones)

Would Bernie Sanders have lost the presidential election?, por Andrew Gellman 

Bernie Woulda Lost, por Kevin Drum

Uma passagem do texto de Gellman:

My guess would be that Sanders’s ideological extremism could’ve cost the Democrats a percentage or two of the vote. So, yes, a priori, before the campaign, I’d say that Hillary Clinton was the stronger general election candidate. And I agree with Drum that, just as lots of mud was thrown at Clinton, the Russians would’ve been able to find some dirt on Sanders too.

But here’s the thing. Hillary Clinton won the election by 3 million votes. Her votes were just not in the right places. Sanders could’ve won a million or two votes less than Clinton, and still won the election. Remember, John Kerrylost to George W. Bush by 3 million votes but still almost won in the Electoral College—he was short just 120,000 votes in Ohio.

So, even if Sanders was a weaker general election candidate than Clinton, he still could’ve won in this particular year.

Or, to put it another way, Donald Trump lost the presidential vote by 3 million votes but managed to win the election because of the vote distribution. A more mainstream Republican candidate could well have received more votes—even a plurality!—without winning the electoral college.

The 2016 election was just weird, and it’s reasonable to say that (a) Sanders would’ve been a weaker candidate than Clinton, but (b) in the event, he could’ve won.