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Comment by lostdog | Hacker News Reader

It's not that complicated. In 2016 America though Bernie was a crazy leftist, and didn't vote for him. He did pick up more votes than expected as a protest against Hillary, and he was just starting to get buy-in on his policies.

Then he went out and sold America on some social democrat ideas. He did ok in 2020, but lost, partially because Democratic voters were afraid that Republicans would see him as a crazy leftist, and partially because Biden had more support from some demographics.

Yeah, there's some billionaire pushback, but Bernie chaired the budget committee. It's not like he was whacked by some billionaire hit squad, he just wasn't quite popular enough to win the presidential primaries.

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Looking all the way downstream, to the end result (voting numbers) is much less valuable vein to mine for insight than how he was portrayed in media, online and in legacy media, before votes were cast. That provides much more insight in to how his campaign failed, in my eyes at least.

I don't have all the historical polling data to say this with certainty, but his policies were pretty much always supported by a majority of the american public from a cursory perplexity search (grain of salt and all that, but seriously, can you think of one policy of his that wasn't popular?)

The more important question, to me at least, than "in 2016 did america think bernie was a crazy leftist?" is, "why, when his policies all had majority voter support, did the candidate himself carry the McCarthy era veil of 'crazy leftist' and 'communist'"?

And I think the answer is the same as in my original comment, a concerted effort from the billionaire class (who own all our media) to do anything BUT accurately portray the guy who vocally wanted to cost them money in favor of those who wanted to enrich them. I think the billionaire class almost always plays a bigger role than we think, but that might just be all the books I read about the machinations of the rich and powerful to manufacture consent. I'm no expert.

I don't 100% disagree, but...

Consider how Obama got piled on for a minor tweak to healthcare laws, and gets called a socialist for ever mentioning that maybe the rich aren't helping out enough.

I've gotta be skeptical that Bernie's policies were majority supported at the time, and any investigation would have to look at the evidence, and especially the polling questions, really carefully.

>I've gotta be skeptical that Bernie's policies were majority supported at the time, and any investigation would have to look at the evidence, and especially the polling questions, really carefully.

Wholly agreed, and I'm unfortunately way too lazy to do that. But I did look at and cite one snapshot in time where all his policy positions had a majority support (except 15$ min wage because it was framed with "risk of job losses")

>consider how Obama...helping out enough

Yeah, agreed, which I think is more evidence that reality, unfortunately, holds less water than whatever the tv/ipad/iphone tells you to believe about the world. That plus the average american reading comprehension being at or below sixth grade level makes for a tough sell of anything but very simple language, very simple policy. And just in general, an uneducated populace tends to be more susceptible to voting against their own interests.

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