Thread by @cjayanetti

Trump apologists 🤝 Jacobin left

'Biden's victory is a disastrous failure for Biden'

It's just so fucking transparent

I dont want to talk too much about this cos I'm very much not american.

But a lot of the reaction is through the frame of pre-election polls that turned out to be off.

For the Dems to win the Senate, in the states that were being run, they'd have needed a big poll lead.

But some people spent years saying that Trump was all but invincible - unless, of course, the Dems picked Sanders.

According to the Jacobin lot, he was a useless, rambling, senile old establishment sell-out who'd crash and burn.

Instead he is going to win.

A few words on Sanders, from a speculative perspective - again, I'm in the UK not the US.

I like Sanders. If I was a US Dem I'd have voted for him. Nothing I've ever written about Corbyn applies to Sanders.

But.

The primary polling showing him outperforming the other Dems in head to heads v Trump was based on enormous youth voting that didnt actually happen even in the primaries.

And US polling ought now to be treated with instinctive scepticism

He only came close to winning the nomination because he had so many rivals. He got nowhere near majority support.

His rivals rallied behind Biden. That was their right. If he couldnt win over Dem primary voters, why be so sure he'd win over disillusioned key state voters?

Could he have beaten Trump? Perhaps. We'll never know.

Its unlikely you'd have had the Lincoln Project types backing him - though we dont know how much impact they actually had.

You can be pretty sure Cubans and Venezuelans in Florida wouldn't have backed him.

Maybe his outsider, anti establishment pitch would have won over disillusioned white working class voters.

How many suburban votes heading to Biden would he have lost? Pass. Independent voters? Pass. We'll never know.

But good god, it's not exactly open and shut.

And bear in mind also, one of Sanders' key campaign strengths is big rallies.

None of that during Covid.

But even if Sanders had done all of that, won the primaries, won the White House, even won the Senate, he'd *still* have to negotiate with centrist Dem senators and deal with an inhospitable SCOTUS.

tldr: shutup Owen