Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
Bernie's failure to do as well this time as in 2016 is due to a few factors:
1. In 2016, Hillary was always the presumptive nominee. Sanders was an insurgent, and really the only alternative. People like an underdog, and people really hate a coronation. In this case, Biden was leading in the polls for a while, then it looked like Warren was going to be the front runner, then Pete looked like he had a shot (although was never a favourite), then Sanders won the first few states and looked like a front runner... By the time Biden really took the lead, the whole thing was basically over. Very different race.
2. No one liked Hillary anyway, because of long-standing Republican smearing of her public persona. They'd been beating up on her for two decades, but especially since '08, because she was also the presumptive nominee way back then. Biden just doesn't have that. Listening to Joe Biden talk does not necessarily make anyone's heart beat faster like listening to Obama did, but no one seems to really hate him (besides a few Bernie people who wouldn't hold any such views if he weren't in this race and about to beat their guy). People hated Hillary. Hillary got more negative press during the Obama administration than Biden, even as the VP.
3. People like Bernie, but the people who support Bernie - the grassroots who have to convince their friends to vote Bernie - an unfortunately large proportion of them are insufferable, presumptuous, strident morons. They're exactly the sorts of people who you'd expect to see this morning saying they aren't going to vote for Biden in the general but will complain for the next four years about Trump. When someone like that tries to secure your vote, you might nod along to avoid an argument but you're not particularly likely to be convinced. Now, last time around, there were plenty of Hillary supporters who could be similarly caricatured, lobbing around accusations of sexism if you won't vote for Hillary, demanding people fall in line, trying to put their finger on the scales, and so forth. Can you even name a Biden surrogate? What does a Biden supporter even look like? They're probably not wearing a T-shirt announcing their affiliation. This is sort of a corollary of the first one - Biden's inoffensive, so are his supporters.
4. Biden spoke directly to working class people, and didn't make any effort to appeal to woke intersectionalists and the NYT editorial board, which were Hillary's core constituency in 2016. As Warren's campaign demonstrated pretty clearly, that's a losing strategy even in a Democratic primary. Bernie didn't go all out the way Warren did, but he did adopt those politics as his strategy to try to win over a chunk of Biden's African American support, and predictably, it yielded no obvious results.
The weird thing here is that normally when you win a primary you have to make a hard pivot to the center for the general. Biden's already in the middle. He might actually have to take a bit of a left turn on a few issues - throw a few bones to the progressive wing - just to try to get them on board. Say, include the wealth tax, some student loan forgiveness and a minimum wage hike, and then give Sanders and Warren credit for bringing you around on those issues to a compromise, to try to give their supporters more than a begrudging endorsement as incentive to support him. Might be worth a shot?
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