Why Sanders lost, and why I think it matters.

[ismnotwasm]

91. I disagree

The phenomena of the "outsider" candidate is not new, indeed it's to be expected. The success of Sanders was due to his outsider status, rather than despite it. He deliberately set himself up that way, or to be more fair, that's how he rolls in general. It was both his greatest blessing and his downfall.

His failure came not only because in the end, people chose Hillary--she's simply the more qualified candidate (name recognition may have played a part of that assessment of voters, true), she has weathered politics for a long time, and when the left started sounding like the right in conspiracy flavored criticism, it became a series of side eye moments and quite frankly embarrassing--but because he failed to garner a message that reached minority voting blocks and women in large enough numbers, and failed spectacularly.

Hillary failed to reach young voters in much the same way, Sanders message sounds fresh and new to them--a brave new political world. Hilary is a nuts and bolts candidate. Detail oriented and practical. Sanders is overarching in concept, details and nuance not being his thing. Hillary campaigned in relatively intimate settings, meeting people, listening to them, addressing concerns-part of a deliberate and as we have seen, very successful campaign strategy --Sanders filled stadiums with a single, populist message, also a deliberate campaign strategy.

Hillary most definitely was addressing economics in the campaign trail, to multiple and diverse groups. Constantly in fact.

Both candidates understand very well how politics work, what is achievable and what is not.

Regarding your original point, remember there was a certain narritive floating around the Sanders campaign that said that cerain voters did not understand what their best interests were. Not only was this a deadly insult, perceived as part of a common racist narrative, the Sanders campaign bungled it badly trying to refute this--and they did try.

The difference in the failures of the two campaigns is the mistakes made and the successes gained in particular voting blocs was the in numbers of actual voters.

Hillary won overwhelmingly and by every metric.