User:Trackinfo/sandbox/Bernie would have won

Bernie would have won is a popular meme that emerged after the 2016 United States Presidential election ended in Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton. The meme refers to the belief that Bernie Sanders would have become president after a hypothetical election between him and Donald Trump, a belief based on both polls and conjecture. The validity of these claims has been disputed. Sanders has mostly avoided commenting on the speculation. The phrase is a rallying cry for those who believe the Democratic Party is a sinking ship. Writing for the Huffington Post, Civil Rights Attorney Noah Baron suggests the "the meme alone is significant: An indictment of the Democratic party establishment. And, just as in the general election, the centrist Democratic Party establishment has failed to grasp the essence of the meme."

Supporters of this perspective point towards the actions of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the primaries, and the role they played in supporting Clinton instead of staying neutral. Daily Kos estimated the difference to be 184 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, which would have been more than enough to erase Clinton's lead.

""There’s good reason to suppose that Sanders would have won the nomination had it not been for shenanigans of the Obama-Clinton party managers. He is now the most popular political figure in the country by a large margin.""

- Noam Chomsky in an interview with the New York Times

"Bernie Sanders that he would have won the Democratic Party nomination if it weren’t for the “corrupt” Democratic National Committee (DNC)"

- Republican Senator Ted Cruz

Political commentators like Lee Camp, Jimmy Dore, Sam Seder, and Bill Press have explored the subject. Sanders has his own podcast that has become popular.

Broader speculation about the subject, suggesting the end of either or both major American political parties, or the credibility of the media has been damaged by the end results of the 2016 Presidential Campaign including by Anis Shivani in AlterNet, republished by the Huffington Post.

The sentiment lead to suspicions that further DNC "shenanigans," in the form of new rules, will prevent Sanders from competing on a fair playing field again in 2020. Those suspicions were bolstered with the election of Tom Perez as DNC Chairman, over Keith Ellison, followed by the purge of liberal members of the DNC leadership. The primary concern is the existence of superdelegates to skew the trend against a popular candidate like specifically Sanders. The efforts to eliminate their existence resulted in a symbolic but ineffective victory for the Sanders camp in 2018, because superdelegates still have the ability to overwhelm convention votes if one candidate does not secure the nomination with a majority on the first ballot.