I’ve a lot of discourse online about how the Democratic Party held back Bernie Sanders from becoming president in 2016 & 2020 during the primaries. But my question to that is, are primaries not decided by the voters to get the most delegates? If the people didn’t vote for him, how is that the Dems’ fault?
A counter I see for that is that Dems endorsed his primary opponent to sway the vote. I dont really think that would have much impact on committed voters. Trump got almost no help in the primaries in 2016 and still won.
Is this narrative true and I’m just oblivious?
Yes, but how do you think candidates get “popular?” With Hillary’s and the DNC’s thumb on the scales, Hillary’s campaign had an unfair and underhanded influence on the public.
I’m not sure if anything Hillary’s campaign did was “illegal”, but it definitely broke things like the DNC’s own bylaws.
Yeah man, I understand that. But the end of the day, why didn’t he get more votes?
…because fewer people voted for him than for Hillary?
Not quite sure what kind of answer you’re fishing for here.
He just wasn’t “as popular as you believe he was.”
I think what they are trying to ask is why did all the DNC undermining still stop people from voting Bernie. The point being that it came off that he was so popular that even DNC with all their undermining shouldn’t have gotten in the way of him winning the nomination.
I feel like we’ve said this to OP already too, but:
However it may have come off, not enough people voted for him to win him the primary. He wasn’t that popular. For reasons mentioned elsewhere.
It’s possible some people who favored Sanders over Hillary voted for Hillary in the primary anyway fearing that she was more likely to win the primary and not wanting to chance unintentionally boosting the chances of someone other than Hillary or Sanders getting the nomination. I don’t know of any polls or anything that might have indicated that was or wasn’t the case. But that still means people didn’t vote enough for Bernie.