What about if he was the Democrat nominee in 2016? Curious how this community feels about it.

32 comments

  1. Keeping in mind that Reddit is not representative of the average American, I’m fairly certain the overwhelming majority of us believe Bernie would have been a much better candidate for president than Trump, and that most of us would prefer him to Biden as well.

  2. Not really. Definitely better than Trump since that’s a really low bar. He is too ideological and will not be pragmatic. He won’t compromise and that would lead to serious in-fighting. In the end he would be quite ineffective.

    With Biden I’m getting better roads, better jobs and student loans getting reduced. And these are all but guaranteed.

  3. An ancient Senator who hasn’t fielded any foreign policy experience and whose domestic policy is….just not practical or even Constitutional at some points? Yeah, no we’d be much better off /s. No it would be terrible. Sanders never showed me that he’s a leader that can decide when or where to apply the most pressure. Nothing would get done except by Executive Fiat. Sanders is NOT a good leader.

  4. I don’t think he would have made any difference. You would still have Manchin and Sinema. 2016 maybe but who knows.

  6. No. Hell no.

    I’m actually full on ambivalent/pleasantly surprised by Brandon at this point, which is wild, but even before that I would have taken him over that Soviet loving dinosaur in a heartbeat.

  7. It would probably be the same, because the President has very limited powers, and the two parties refuse to work together for the most part

  11. Worse. He would be to radical to get manchin to vote for his agenda.

    He was likely too radical to win a general election.

  12. Worse.

    Just a few weeks before the invasion, Bernie was going around the Guardian peddling the Russian talking points of how it was NATO’s fault and how we didn’t understand Russian concerns and how we should appease them.

    No, we completely understood Russian concerns and their stated imperialistic goals of creating a modern Kievan Rus state (written on paper by Putin, several months before the invasion).

    Bernie bros and Bernie Sanders have zero foreign policy acumen and they enable authoritarians and despots, by default. That’s why your AMLOs and your Corbyns suck up to Putin and push for “peace” and for oppressed people to not arm themselves with weapons.

    Ukraine would’ve 100% fallen were Sanders president.

  13. I think he would have been worse than Biden. Far too left wing for most people. His agenda would have a very hard time in the congress we have now.

    As for 2016 I think Trump would have still won.

  15. Probably not any better, Russia probably would’ve still invaded Ukraine with Bernie in office and maybe even worse since I don’t know if Bernie would’ve given Ukraine weapons aid like Biden is now, even if I dislike Biden. Some of Bernie’s social policies sound great, but I don’t know if he would’ve had the stomach for foreign policy if the US were attacked for example. I consider myself to lean slightly left of center libertarian, but these are reasons why I’m not as high on Bernie as a lot of others. I mean I’m by no means a hawk, I’m actually a non-interventionist when it comes to using our military boots on the ground unless we’re attacked like I said. But I do support that if we’re attacked, then we can also go help out others with our military while we’re at it, like a Pearl Harbor situation. My point was, I don’t even think Bernie if we were ever in that situation where we were attacked first, he could do what’s right. I do think helping out using weapons aid without boots on the ground when a country has been invaded is fine and a thing we should be doing to show if we support that country without getting directly involved, which is what we’re doing now with Ukraine that I’m not sure Bernie would even do.

  16. I don’t imagine too much would be different. Bernie Sanders took ~~bribes~~ campaign contributions, just like all the other candidates. He would be just as beholden to Alphabet, Amazon, Walmart, Disney, and AT&T as anyone else.

    The only difference is that we wouldn’t have PTSD from listening to him speak like we do from a certain someone.

  17. I doubt anything majorly different would have happened. He’s still have to deal with Congress who would curtail a lot of his agenda.

  19. I have very mixed opinions on Biden’s presidency, but I can say with certainty that he has handled Ukraine about as well as you possibly could. I have zero faith that Bernie would have been up to the task of confronting Russia in any meaningful way.

  20. slightly better but not by much. He would’ve probably had better weed policies and foreign policy (in my opinion) than biden. That being said i don’t think there would be much major differences between the presidencies as a lot of his ideas would not pass through congress.

  21. Good chance that we’d be in the middle of a Civil War now.

    Biden was “bad” enough (Note: I’m not anti-Biden, but a lot of the US population is). Sanders? The people who chant “Let’s Go Brandon” would be grabbing their guns instead.

  22. ***Worse. Much much worse! That applies to any democrat/RINO!*** That is all I have to say under the rules of this forum.

  23. In 2016, yes! Back then, Bernie had a much better shot at winning because I feel like many people were more open to his ideas, plus a lot of people didn’t like the actual Democratic nominee. I don’t think there would have been the “pick the lesser of two evils” BS if it was Bernie vs. Trump back in 2016.

    2020 is a different story. Ukraine, and thus American foreign policy, would definitely be worse off if Biden wasn’t currently in charge.

  24. We need leftists leaders. Bernie isn’t radical enough to spearhead the reforms we need. Though we would certainly be much better than anyone we’ve had lately.

  25. Truthfully?

    Beats the crap out of me. Seriously.

    See, I have this theory that once you win the Presidency they take you into a back room and give you a briefing as to the actual situation in the world and your actual powers and abilities as President.

    And that changes you and your outlook.

    Notice the number of Presidents who were elected, who ran on some platform or another, then like five minutes before they assumed the Oval Office, seem to *completely* change their tune on a bunch of stuff.

    So it’s quite possible Bernie the candidate would have looked *absolutely nothing* like Bernie the President.

    —-

    I also suspect this is one reason why the establishment really had a hard-on for getting rid of Trump. Not just the Democrats who waled and gnashed their teeth five seconds after learning Hillary Clinton lost. But after Trump arrived in the Oval Office.

    See, I think they took him to the room, gave him the briefing–and he basically ignored it.

  27. I don’t know. Look at Biden’s presidency and how you have people calling him a radical liberal or whatever. Now think about where Sanders stands relative to Biden and then imagine trying to get the votes in Congress to get things passed.

  28. Definitely not better. He is a SHOCKINGLY ineffective Senator who forms no alliances in Congress and has a woefully poor aptitude for foreign policy. He’s almost never done anything of consequence with his career and I think if he was president he’d be appalled at how little actual power he’d have. He really can’t deal with being disagreed with.

  29. Worse. Rhe division based on income would be far worse than it is and the economy would be in even wirse shape as he would have more and more incentives to not work. There would be even more unnecessary government intervention in peoples lives

  30. I don’t think he’d have been as hard-nosed as Biden regarding Russia, and I feel like that is the most important issue that has came up since 2020.

  31. Depends on how effect he’d have been. He hsa wonderful ideas but he isn’t always good at convincing other people to vote for them.

    I think Biden has been more successful than Bernie would have been, sad to say. The fact that Biden can get the repuglicans to do ANY decent piece of work is a triumph. And he does that by rallying the troops and relying on connections. He plays politics well.

  32. I think Bernie would have been an absolute disaster. The only candidate who would have done worse than Hillary Clinton.

    What no body wants to acknowledge is that Hillary Clinton was a terrible politician. Honestly. She blew two lay ups in her 2008 and 2016 runs. Heck, in 2016, Trump was her best chance of winning. Candidates such as Kasich were clobbering her in the matchup polls. And she still blew it.

    Truthfully, the way for Democrats to win is to have a moderate run. Biden was that guy in 2020. The middle class of America looked at him and said, “Okay, hey, I can live with him for four years.”

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