2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: In which states would Bernie have done better or worse.. [View all]BigBoss26
(25 posts)And I certainly think it's fair to say that an argument for Hillary as the nominee is that she'd definitely be starting with a bigger guaranteed bank of support.
But I still think, ultimately, the party loyalists show up for Bernie in the GE. They might have have hemmed and hawed about it a little more but they'd be there in the end. In a way, Trump himself was the biggest guarantee that the base would come out. Trump wasn't just an unqualified candidate, he outright scares sensible voters(and he should). So I think the base would have been there regardless of who got the nomination.
So for me, the question isn't whether or not the base comes out, it's: Was Bernie's crossover appeal real and, if so, would it hold up under Republican attacks? We can't know the answer to this one way or the other but that's the real "what if" when it comes to this particular topic.