Slate: Polls Say Sanders More Electable Than Hillary: Don't Believe Them
In recent days, several writers—Sahil Kapur in Bloomberg Politics, David Corn in Mother Jones, Greg Sargent in the Washington Post, Ed Kilgore in New York, and others—have sketched this argument. But is it true? Polls suggest it is. A concerted attack on Sanders’ weaknesses would hurt him badly in a general election. Here’s how it would look.
The problem with current polls that test Sanders against Trump or Cruz is that they don’t capture the effects of the fall campaign. As Harry Enten points out in FiveThirtyEight, early general-election polls in previous cycles were predictively worthless. Early in the 2000 election, for instance, George W. Bush led Al Gore by 12 percentage points. “Bush, then the Texas governor, burst onto the national scene with relatively little negative media scrutiny,” Enten observes. Between December 1999 and November 2000, as the scrutiny intensified, Bush’s net favorability fell 27 percentage points. He ended up losing the popular vote.
Basically, if you were designing the perfect target for Republicans—a candidate who proudly links socialist economics to hippie culture, libertinism, left-wing foreign policy, new-age nonsense, and contempt for bourgeois values—you’d create Bernie Sanders. Clinton could have attacked these weaknesses in the primary—her supporters had an opposition research file on Sanders’ “associations with communism”—but she didn’t. In a general election, Republicans wouldn’t hesitate.
Would a GOP assault along these lines hurt Sanders? Absolutely. Start with his spending plans. Two months ago, an Associated Press-GfK poll asked Americans about Sanders’ proposal to replace “the private health insurance system … with a single government-run and taxpayer-funded plan” that “would cover medical, dental, vision, and long-term care services.” A 39 percent plurality favored the idea. Then the poll asked people whether they’d still support the plan if it meant “your own taxes would increase.” Suddenly, the plurality disappeared: Only 28 percent still favored the plan; 39 percent opposed it. When the poll mentioned that people would have to “give up other coverage like employer coverage” as part of the government-run system, again, 39 percent opposed it, while only 28 percent supported it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/04/polls_say_bernie_is_more_electable_than_hillary_don_t_believe_them.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_top
= new reply since forum marked as read
