I think so too Y va. Above all I think that, if it comes down to an election, Sanders will be able to swing both independent voters and conservatives who have gotten disillusioned by the inherent corruption in Washington politics. A lot of Democrats never stopped and considered that when Trump yelled about draining the swamp it was actually something that needed to be done. He did the exact opposite of course, he filled it with more alligators instead, but he could pretend to be for change in Washington because change was needed in the first place. It seems to me that we're living in fundamentally dishonest times of corporate lobbyism and corporate media. If MSNBC is any better than Fox News nowadays we're talking about small nuances of grey, and you can say the same about the Democrats and the GOP for the most part, a few (mostly) young progressives excluded.
People who live in small towns without health care and have to work two or three jobs for basic income see Hillary Clinton make millions off giving closed door speeches to Wall Street banks, where reassurances about regulations and taxes are quietly being made, and they don't see a person who's fundamentally different than any other millionaire. They see Joe Biden and they're reminded of how he's so close to credit banking and the predatory lending industry that he used to joke about how the banks were the real senator from his home state.
I watched a clip from one of Bernie's Fox News town hall appearances, and he got huge rounds of applause from hardcore republicans because he spoke at length about what they have in common rather than about their disagreements. At the end of the day they don't want their medicare taken away either, they don't want lesser funds to education, they want veterans taken care of instead of being left homeless on the streets, and they all agree that millionaires and companies should pay much higher taxes than they currently do. They want better conditions for both workers and small business owners, instead of laws that either hand out breaks to the big and mighty or put the financial burden on the wrong party. Neoliberals never seem to get this. It's the same in virtually every country. They think of themselves as champions of the working people and then seem dumbfounded when the working class doesn't vote for them.
I know someone whose family run a small Feed 'n Seed store in South Carolina. Like a lot of small business owners they pay an obscene amount of money each year for health insurance since there are no more options in the marketplace. It's so symptomatic of the way things are done in Washington. You take one good idea - healthcare should be affordable to everyone - and then you water it down and compromise it until Obamacare comes out the other side. Instead of reforming the system with a single payer on top you push the problem on the insurance industry.
Bernie has been complaining about these things for fifty years without toeing any party line, and I reckon there's value in that kind of consistency to people on both sides of the spectrum. If they start to believe that they actually want the same things and just have a different method of how to achieve them then Sanders becomes a serious option to Trump. You can't say the same about any other current Democrat really. They all hold positions on banking, climate, taxes and medicare that you feel they'll compromise with (or outright abandon) to various degrees.
