2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: In all the "Bernie would have won/No he wouldn't" posts I've read........... [View all]socialist_n_TN
(11,481 posts)ESPECIALLY if it were a three-way race with Bloomberg in it. I do think that he would have gotten a majority of Clinton voters though and Bloomberg would have gotten the rest. In these days of polarization, I don't think that even Clinton voters would have voted for Trump, so Bloomberg it would have been the next logical choice. Trump would have also gotten less votes because Bloomberg would have taken the establishment Republicans from him.
I do however think that there's a ceiling to third party votes at this time, so Bloomberg would have probably topped out at a maximum of 25%, leaving Trump and Bernie to split the rest of the votes, say 35% each. Bernie gets an extra ten percent discouraged/independent voters and he would have won the popular vote. How the EC would have shook out would take more research than I want to do on a thought experiment. So, as I said, it might still have gone to the House.
And yes there are a lot of suppositions in this. Does Bloomberg actually run if it's Trump and Bernie? In my estimation, probably. Could Bloomberg have gotten on the ballot in all 50 states? Maybe, but for sure in most of them. Is the ceiling of 25% reasonable? Perot got around 20% of the popular vote and 1992 wasn't a year of anti-establishmentarianism, so I think that's reasonable. Would Trump and Bernie split the rest of the votes after Bloomberg took his share? Probably in my estimation, but that is my opinion and I recognize it as such. But I think that overall an extra 10% if discouraged/ independent votes for Bernie would be a reasonable assumption AND would have made him the popular vote winner. And I actually think that Bernie would have taken votes from Trump that Clinton proved incapable of doing. Maybe not a lot, but some anyway.
But my point is NOT really that Bernie could have won a two or a three way election. My point is that there is a bloc of over half of the voting age population that are either discouraged or independent of the two major political parties. And this bloc won't be ignored for long. It's too big to be ignored forever.
Maybe us Trots can win them to an anti-capitalist workers' party and revolution.