this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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I think a lot of it hinges on what a “moderate” is, in the American political frame of reference, and whether one of those is good enough for most of the American people who don’t live in Washington or NYC to ever have a chance of living a decent life.
You’ve got a point, I guess, about some of it. But I still mostly stick by my statement that Hillary fucked it, when Bernie would have crushed it, on economic policy and sanity in our Israel policy among several other key issues where the majority of people feel very differently than the people in DC and on the news do.
As long as a majority of Americans see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, Sanders' economic policies have less mass appeal and offer more opportunities for attack ads than you think. It needs to be stressed that people voted for Trump not just because he's a loud-mouthed racist and sexist and they like that, but also because he inherited the (irrational) image of Republicans being better for the economy.
Public opinion on Israel was, even among college kids, very different in 2016, before the current wave of massed anti-Israel propaganda from Russian, Chinese and Iranian bot farms sweeping over social media - and even now most voters (as in: people who actually vote) are still more pro-Israel than pro-Palestine (which makes sense, given how important of a partner Israel is to the US) - and it's still not high on the list of priorities for most, not even remotely high enough to be mentioned side-by-side with economic policy, which is and almost always has been the number one priority.
Are you saying that the polls are completely wrong? What are you basing the idea on that the "majority of the people" (reminder: the majority of voters just elected Trump - he actually got the popular vote this time, which is deeply, deeply troubling) have left-leaning positions on the economy and Israel?
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/trackers/fame-and-popularity-bernie-sanders
He's more popular than either Trump or Kamala Harris was, and people seemed to think both of them had enough mass appeal.
The image of Trump exists more or less in a media vacuum, because they can't say much of anything about either Trump or Kamala. Bernie speaks directly about the economy, in terms that people can understand, and every time he says things, he draws wild amounts of appeal from the both the downtrodden right-voting people and the downtrodden left-voting people, who are otherwise left with nothing but responding to the vague promptings of the media within the vacuum.
Even Trump has to imitate Bernie's type of speaking, talking about draining the swamp and fighting for the little man, but he can't do it very well. The media has to fill in the blanks for him. Bernie can do it directly, and from what I've seen, it works very well. Do you remember when he went on Joe Rogan and what people's reaction was to that?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/611375/americans-views-israel-palestinian-authority-down.aspx
You might be right. I think a huge factor is that on left-wing social media, which is what you and I use, the Gaza issue was hugely amplified and linked to Biden/Harris, in a way that other issues that were much more favorable were not. For the normie social media, I think they did the same thing with the economy, which also worked gangbusters.
I am saying the polls are, in general, completely wrong, yes. I think the most recent election which was anything but the toss-up they predicted is a good example of that.
Bernie's economics are "left," but within the spectrum of the average American voter, they aren't seen as left-only. He doesn't care much about Democrat branding issues. He cares about people's pain and how to stick it to the crooks, and he speaks well about it. That's why the Democrats didn't like him.