I am Andrew Juan, and I was the National Youth Director for the Yang2020 Presidential Campaign! I'm here to answer questions on youth engagement in politics and the 2020 election! Ask Me Anything!

Bernie could absolutely beat Trump.

I think the word "absolutely" is stretching it. Bernie had a chance of beating Trump, but his chances of doing so were demonstrably less than Biden's. When the field cleared, Bernie's aggregated support went from around 26-28% to between 34-36%. Biden's went from 15-18% to about 45-50%. This is in spite of the fact that Bernie raised hundreds of millions of dollars and outspent Biden in every single state. People knew who he was and what he stood for, and while many of his ideas polled well, most of that support dropped when specifics started being discussed.

Bernie was an excellent candidate for young people, but given they don't show up to vote at the same level older people do, his entire GE strategy would have had to rely on driving out young voters while not alienating the older ones. I don't personally see how he would have accomplished this given he went so far to the left that his major policy ideas combined would have cost anywhere from 60-100 trillion dollars over a decade. I mean, there's a good reason Trump wanted so badly to face Bernie in an election but was so terrified of Biden that he committed an impeachable offense to dig up dirt on him. A Trump vs Bernie election would have been a referendum on socialism rather than a barrage of criticism against the most corrupt administration in modern history. Advertisements of Bernie saying he would raise taxes on the middle class would play in every swing state until election day. And because he had such limited support outside of his base he would have been relying on all those "establishment Democrats" to carry him into the White House.

Democrats came out in droves to vote against him on Super Tuesday; essentially at the last minute. He was so vulnerable that a few weeks of frontrunner status pushed a lot of moderate to liberal voters into the "Not Bernie" camp. This wasn't an establishment plot and it definitely wasn't some media conspiracy; if anything, Bernie received an outsized benefit from the horserace narrative in 2016 and that gave him national prominence. Bernie's strategy relied on a split field in a proportional delegate contest and it capsized the moment that field cleared. It will probably go down in history as one of the worst modern strategies in history and I promise no one will work to repeat it.

He didn't do enough to earn the votes of people outside of his base, and quite frankly until progressives acknowledge this and accept that he didn't run a good campaign with competent staff I don't see how any progressive strategy that mirrors this one will be able to win. I've worked on three presidential campaigns and I'm still amazed at how many people on reddit and social media think Bernie would have sailed to victory. It would have been a huge uphill battle, and you would have needed every person who saw Bernie as the lesser of two evils to come out and vote for him (and there would have been a lot).

/r/IAmA Thread Parent