A Trump-Sanders election - Never Trumper nightmare come true

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The rise of socialist Bernie Sanders is frustrating Never Trump Republicans who are hoping the Democratic Party nominates a consensus, center-left presidential candidate they are comfortable supporting in November. If Sanders is the Democratic nominee, many will sit out the election and be deprived of the opportunity of voting against President Trump, they said.

Sanders is surging days before the Iowa caucuses and a couple of weeks before the New Hampshire primary, leaving Republican operatives avowedly opposed to Trump worried and perplexed. Most are convinced swing voters in key battlegrounds would reject Sanders, paving the way for Trump’s reelection. They are also convinced the Vermont senator, 78, is simply too liberal to earn their vote. With a Sanders nomination, Never Trump Republicans are unsure of what comes next.

“I don’t know where the anti-Trump movement goes from there,” said Jennifer Horn, a Never Trump Republican and former New Hampshire GOP chairwoman who is affiliated with the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans who have pressured GOP senators to support impeachment.

“It’s a really tough question,” added political strategist Sarah Longwell, a Never Trump Republican at the center of an unsuccessful effort to recruit a formidable candidate to challenge the president in the 2020 GOP primary.

Anti-Trump Republicans are holding out hope for 77-year-old Joe Biden.

The former vice president is a Democrat they can embrace, they said: liberal, but not too far left, and moderate in tone. Biden consistently polls well against Trump and leads the Democratic field nationally. He now trails a climbing Sanders in the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses and the Feb. 11 New Hampshire primary, but he leads in the other critical early states and is better positioned to win the party’s crown than other contenders they could stomach, such as Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Mike Bloomberg.

If Biden wins the nomination, many Never Trump Republicans are prepared to work on his behalf to attract disaffected voters on the Right just like them, but Never Trump Republicans have limits. Philosophically conservative and not wanting to be perceived as otherwise, they view Sanders’s self-professed "democratic socialism" as equally problematic and might skip 2020 altogether if he leads the Democratic ticket.

“It’s asking a lot from people on the center-right or in the old Reagan wing of GOP to go full Sanders in November,” said Jerry Taylor, who runs the Niskanen Center, a Washington think tank that has become a hub for the Never Trump community. Taylor does plan to support Sanders in the general election if the senator wins the Democratic nod but described himself, and others like him, as the exception to the rule.

“I would not feel particularly happy about it, but I would swallow hard and pull the lever,” Taylor said.

Should Sanders emerge, Never Trump Republicans say they and independent conservatives itching to oust Trump in the fall are likely to sit on their hands or vote for a hopeless third-party candidate in protest.

That is what Longwell concluded after two years and several focus groups with persuadable voters in the Rust Belt as part of her extensive research into the best strategy for holding Trump to a single term.

Longwell conceded Sanders would juice the liberal base, but she said his plans for expansive government and European-style foreign policy would scare away the voters he needs in the Midwest to produce an Electoral College majority. This includes the soft Republicans, suburban swing voters, and college-educated women who often voted GOP in the past but supported mainstream Democrats in droves in the midterm elections.

“Bernie Sanders will get beaten by Donald Trump,” Longwell said. “He’s a nonstarter for swing voters.”

The endless torment to which Trump-skeptical conservatives were first consigned in 2016 has been nothing if not creative. Their latest ordeal, as Washington Examiner columnist David Drucker recently observed, involves their pinning hopes for a restoration of the pre-Trump status quo on, of all people, Joe Biden.

For erstwhile Republican partisans who spent the better part of the last decade opposing the administration in which Biden served, the duty they feel is a special sort of misery. They are rationalizing themselves into pulling the lever for a candidate who accused them of seeking to reimpose slavery on African-Americans, whose instincts on foreign affairs are consistently atrocious, and who has committed himself to a more liberal agenda than even Hillary Clinton’s. But Biden doesn’t want to pay people not to work or nationalize the health-insurance industry, so he finds himself on the moderate end of the present Democratic spectrum. Everything is relative, so why make the perfect the enemy of the good? Disappointment is, after all, the default state of the right’s Trump skeptics.

But Drucker’s dispatch reveals that a new sort of resignation is washing over conservatives in political limbo. As Democratic primary polls shift in Bernie Sanders’s direction, these conservatives are forced to confront the prospect of a Sanders-Trump election. Their anxiety is palpable.

Soapbox progressives are quick to write off this demographic, but Democratic political professionals are not. It wasn’t high turnout in dark blue urban enclaves that made the 2018 midterm cycle what it was for Democrats but the suburbs. There, many educated, affluent, older voters—white women in particular—broke with the president they’d supported in 2016. There is much this administration did in its first two years for voters with conservative impulses to like, but those accomplishments could not quiet their concerns about the president himself.

The president’s moral shortcomings and misuses of his authority are well documented, but Trump skeptical voters with conservative leanings would not just ratify those shortcomings with their vote. They would render a verdict of support for a presidency that is increasingly bereft of the voices that were responsible for the conventionally Republican policies they backed. All voters should be concerned about a presidency that has survived both impeachment and a special counsel probe, but especially voters with an affinity for a limited government. Trump would enter his second term uniquely undeterred by checks on the executive reserved for Congress and the judiciary.

But what is their alternative? If the answer is Bernie Sanders, that’s no alternative at all. A Sanders campaign cannot make the moral case against the president’s character—at least, not in a way that satisfies conservatives’ concerns. Sanders has spent his career subordinating moral qualms to his policy objectives, and every dissident population under the yoke of socialism or indigenous population ethnically cleansed by his ideological allies has suffered as a result. Nor can Sanders effectively campaign against the president’s habit of dividing Americans against each other and indulging in xenophobic rhetoric. At least, not while he has surrounded himself with a growing cadre of activists embroiled in anti-Semitic controversies.

There are few, if any, policy prescriptions Sanders espouses that conventional conservatives unmoved by populist grievance politics would find appealing. Conservative Trump critics who have taken solace in the president’s handling of relations with Israel, as well as his administration’s confrontational approach toward Russia, Iran, and hostile international organizations like the United Nations General Assembly, can look forward to a presidency that would make Barack Obama’s appear conventional by comparison. And while Donald Trump represented a departure from the institutionalism that typified past presidencies, the lack of a populist intellectual infrastructure on the right compelled him to staff his administration with establishmentarians who favored continuity over revolutionary change. Sanders wouldn’t have that same problem. A Sanders administration would have no trouble finding progressive reformers who know how to wield the levers of power in this country to effect radical change even outside the legislative process.

If typically Republican voters who remain unsold on Donald Trump and the GOP he has transformed over the last four years thought 2016 was a devil’s choice, they might not have seen anything yet. A Trump-Sanders race would test the limits of their patience like nothing else.

easiest decision ever = "unbearable anguish"???

At this hour, in an election "today," with tensions high and vitriol flying, the contest stands:
* Bernie Sanders 52%, Trump 43%, Democrat wins by 9.
* Joe Biden 50%, Trump 43%, Democrat wins by 7.
* Mike Bloomberg 49%, Trump 42%, Republican-turned Democrat New Yorker defeats Democrat-turned Republican New Yorker by 7.
* Elizabeth Warren 48%, Trump 45%, Democrat wins by 3.
* Pete Buttigieg 47%, Trump 44%, Democrat wins by 3.
* Andrew Yang 46%, Trump 44%, Democrat leads by 2, within the theoretical sampling error.
* Tom Steyer 44%, Trump 44%, tied.
* Trump 45%, Amy Klobuchar 43%, Trump leads by 2, within the theoretical sampling error.
* Trump 44%, Tulsi Gabbard 39%, impeached incumbent Republican President is re-elected by 5.

This really would be horrible.

The faults of Trump are many, well-documented, relevant, and severe. I am not going to waste any more time on them. Trump has no relevant redeeming features.

The faults of Sanders are also well documented, and largely the same as Trump. In summary, he is an ideological zealot who has little to no real understanding of how the world fits together and is utterly unsuited to hold office. However, he has several redeeming features relative to Trump.

First, Sanders at least has respect for democracy and the rule of law, which Trump does not. This, combined with the US’s existing checks and balances, would taper the worst of Sanders in most situations.

Second, Sanders has some positive social policies which the US is in desperate need of. He wishes to expand suffrage which is an essential part of democracy. He will halt deportations, a major human rights scandal. And he wants to expand worker’s rights, an area where the US lags considerably behind the developed world. On balance, I think this makes Sanders a more tolerable option for liberals than the other socialist candidates, Warren and Gabbard.

If the choice came down to Sanders or Trump then it would be a rotten choice between two evil men, but it would still be an easy choice. Electing Bernie Sanders would be like eating five rotten apples. Electing Donald Trump would be like eating five hundred.

For all our sakes, let’s hope Biden can win the Democratic nomination. He’s the one Trump has been trying hardest to smear and the one with the best positions.

I don't think Sanders will win the nomination. Even with wins in Iowa New Hampshire and Nevada (a plausible scenario) he probably still loses South Carolina by a huge margin and enters two candidate race with Biden that runs a lot like a rerun of Hillary Clinton vs Sanders. It's worth remembering Hillary Clinton crushed Bernie by nearly 4 million votes and 14 percentage points in the last democratic primary.

Sanders has also come under relatively little fire from the democratic field. Harris, Warren, and Buttigieg, all had their surges reversed when the rest of the field trained their fire on them. In this respect the democratic primary is reminiscent of the last republican primary. The lead challenger to Trump kept rotating as candidates surged and fell but Trump held steady at ~30% of the polls. Biden has held steady between 27% and 30% in the national poll averages for nearly the entire election.

I think a Sanders or Warren candidacy likely ends in a Trump re-election. The fundamentals favor standing pat over making a change and while Trump's scandals and historically low approval rating (for the state the economy), make it likely that a Democrat can beat him, it is unlikely if that Democrat stands for radical change. Biden is an odd case because politically he's probably right where the country wants to be right now, but the man himself seems to have lost a step mentally. I think Buttigieg or Klobuchar likely win an election against Trump but both will struggle to secure the nomination and have their own liabilities.