The Republicans are demonstrating clearly the falsity of what was claimed by many Dems and allies here a few months ago and is being loudly asserted by Trump supporters currently.
No the fervent agitators and "outsider" partisans who call themselves, incorrectly, the base cannot carry an election. The people who do the boring and thankless admin and organizing campaign stuff, the dreaded insiders and "establishment", are necessary and vital. All the zealotry in the world cannot make up for organizational savvy and exprerience. Don't get me wrong, we need both, and they need both. The difference is we have both to a great degree, with the few sad Busters massively outnumbered by enthusiastic Dem partisan volunteers. They are losing too many of the insiders, the real tribal knowledge and veteran people who know how to run elections, so they are losing the election, which could have been very winnable with a traditional R candidate supported by a unified party machine.
This is not about Bernie Sanders by the way, and not even about most of his supporters. Sanders would not have been Trump. Not only is he far less objectionable to the apathetic apolitical, but he is, despite many claims mostly made by others, a political insider. A couple of decades in Congress even as an independent give you a store of knowledge and contacts and "ropes" that Trump will never get close to even if he tries. Most of his supporters knew this, and thought it would be great to get some more dynamic policy priorities and some energizing of new voters in more ways than one. A few though bought a bit too much into this new/different/outsider/revolution/fuck the establishment image that the Republicans are actually trying, with predictably cataclysmic results.
I'd have liked to have seen a Sanders presidency. I would not have liked to have seen the presidential campaign imagined not by Sanders himself, who has doubtless forgotten more about politics than I'll ever know, but by some of his more wild-eyed supporters. I think savvy Republicans are getting that pretty clearly right now.
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