Even without the socialism, Bernie's policy positions alone would sink him in the GE. [View all]

[DanTex]

Single payer is a big example. Obamacare barely maintained public support, and one of the big selling points was that you could keep your current care if you wanted. When that happened not to be true for some tiny number of people (mainly because their plans covered so little that they didn't satisfy the new minimum regulations), there was outrage.

With single payer, nobody gets to keep their current plan. If you like your current plan, and don't want Medicare, you're SOL. If you don't trust the government to run a large program like this (trust in the government's ability to run things polls at about 25%), you're SOL. If your doctor currently doesn't take Medicare, and you're worried that if SP happens s/he will instead go all-cash, you're SOL. Good luck with that sale.

And the other thing is, the people who have examined Bernie's plan in detail so far are liberals like Krugman, and even among them the near-unanimous verdict is that his plan is unworkable. In the GE, there will be a lot more examinations done, and they won't be nearly as friendly or honest as the current liberal consensus of "nice idea, but it's gonna cost more than that." Not only that, but the Hillary campaign has barely gone after single payer -- her critique is basically that instead of starting over, we should build on what we have. Hardly a mention, for example, of the fact that every single person who likes their current coverage would be forced off of it and into Medicare, with no choices.

Then there's foreign policy. Bernie hasn't actually given his long-promised foreign policy speech, but we all know what his foreign policy is. Essentially, he's a pacifist, and certainly a non-interventionist. Which plays great with the left, but the American public is not pacifist, it is at least modestly hawkish. With respect to ISIS, polls show that a Americans, by a large margin, think we are not being aggressive enough against ISIS, the opposite of what Bernie is selling. Even committing ground troops to Iraq and Syria, which is heresy among many Dems, polls about 50-50.

In the primaries, he's been criticized for lack of experience, and for answering all questions with "I didn't vote for Iraq." And those are good points, but again, it's absolutely nothing compared to how hard he's going to get hammered for his pacifist stances in the general. And, it's not just right-wingers who think we should be more aggressive in the Middle East.

And so on. The tax raises. Yeah, you can sell them to some people by arguing that they will end up saving more money. Of course, that's only if you believe Bernie's projections, which not even liberal economists and health policy researchers believe. On DU, people who ask the obvious question: "OK, but what if it costs more?" get pilloried, but in the real world, when faced with the prospect of middle class tax increases, the electorate is going to be asking that question and more. And they're not going to just ignore the tax increases because a politician promises them that "you will end up more money under my plan."