If only...
"I did an interesting national poll, two days before the general election. The question was this: “If the Presidential candidates were Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican Donald Trump, for whom would you vote?”
The results were: Sanders 56%, Trump 44%.
That would have been the largest presidential victory since 1984 (Reagan vs. Mondale), and the largest Democratic victory since 1964 (Johnson vs. Goldwater).
Bernie Sanders would have won more than 400 electoral votes. He would have swept every Atlantic state except South Carolina. He would have prevailed in every state bordering Mexico, including Texas, which the Democrats haven’t won since 1976.
The crosstabs for the poll show that the difference would have been concentrated in the independent vote, with Sanders winning them by 10, instead of losing them by 17. Sanders also would have performed 38 points better than Secretary Clinton (relative to Trump) among voters who didn’t graduate from high school, and 39 points better among voters under the age of 30.
Against Trump, Sanders would have done much better than Secretary Clinton – in fact, equally better -- among both men and women. After the last such Democratic landslide, in 1964, the Democrats held 68 seats in the Senate (a filibuster-proof majority even under the old rules, which required 67 votes) and 295 seats in the House. Both were two-thirds majorities, large enough even to introduce constitutional amendments. A Sanders presidency would have been an opportunity to do good that would have even surpassed what we had in the 111th Congress, in 2009 and 2010.
As we contemplate the dark days ahead, and then as we suffer through them, we Democrats should remember that it could have been entirely different. All we had to do was to elect a Progressive as President – just as a large majority of Americans really wanted.
Courage,
Rep. Alan Grayson" |
