4 Reasons Sanders Can Win the General

[eridani]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jedediah-purdy/four-reasons-sanders-can_b_9198048.html

1. Energy and turnout:
Sanders inevitably gets compared to Obama '08, and the Iowa Democratic caucus turnout (a bit lower than in 2008) suggested he may not have quite the same wave going yet; but the relevant comparator is obviously not Obama '08 but Clinton '16, and there's a straightforward case that Sanders's supporters would continue to be more on fire and mobilized in the general than hers. He certainly seems to be winning the enthusiasm race in the primaries. Also, it is possible, though a wild card, that Sanders might energize some of the formerly Democratic working-class voters who haven't gone Republican, but have just stopped voting.

2. The more they know him...:
It's been easy to say that Iowa and NH are welcoming states for Sanders, but they didn't look that way a year ago. He's come from way, way behind in both, and was almost universally regarded as a token candidate until sometime in the late fall. So, where voters have actually thought about the campaign, he's done extraordinarily well.

3. Ideological:
Yes, some 50 percent of voters say they wouldn't vote for a socialist; but a lot of those are people who haven't thought about the word since the 1970s. We should take this profession of hostility even less seriously than pundits have taken the large share of young voters who say they like socialism, the Iowa Dems who say they identify as socialist, etc.

4. Demographic:
The race question is an untested canard against Sanders at this point. Nearly everyone who has voted for him is white -- they're in Iowa and New Hampshire! Voters elsewhere aren't paying much attention yet. There's more than a little condescension in the common assumption that non-white voters are loyal to the Clintons, or to political machines that are wired into the Clinton apparatus. Recently, South Carolina numbers showed Sanders gaining ground faster among black voters than whites. We'll just have