The case for Bernie Sanders, revisited

It's been a weird year!

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Back in January 2020, Vox did an exercise where a bunch of different writers made their best cases for different potential Democratic nominees, and I made the case for Bernie Sanders.

Since I have more recently made the case that moderates are better at winning elections, there’s a tension there worth exploring. One thing to say about this is that, as I wrote in the piece about moderates, it’s not like ideological positioning is the only thing that matters for election-winning. And as I detail in the Sanders piece, Bernie personally has an excellent electoral track-record where he consistently runs ahead of the Democratic ticket.

The through-line in my argument across the two pieces, if you read them together or are generally familiar with Yglesias Thought, is that Democrats have specifically hurt themselves since 2012 with leftward moves on guns and immigration. And Bernie’s record on guns and immigration is actually more moderate than Joe Biden’s.

Bu…