So you think they are ignoring his fundraising abilities, his favorability ratings, and his improving polling numbers which show him as most likely to beat Trump? They can pretend these things aren't real in public but I don't think they are that stupid to deny they are real behind closed doors.
But Bernie hasn't been through the Republican slime machine yet. Rick Wilson has said that his remaining counterparts working for Trump are hoping Bernie will be the nominee. Wilson himself said he can come up with a dozen ads to run against Sanders that casts him as a loony north eastern socialist off the top of his head. Polls have shown that if voters are convinced the nominee is a "socialist" they lose. There is a huge divide between those over and under about 40 years old. For those over 40, there are all the old anti-communist memes we knew before we could talk still lurking back there to be re-energized by the right ad campaign. Those under 40 lack the memes and don't see what the big deal is. The bulk of voters are over 40.
The Democratic establishment knows this too. Most of them are over 40 and they know those memes are there in most older Americans.
I don't think the older, establishment Democrats have as big a problem with the party moving to the left in principle as some of the critics think. I think it's more of a case of them looking at the larger picture of running a national campaign in the current environment. The public is generally not happy with Trump or the Republicans at this point. The younger generations are much more liberal than older generations. However any candidate running today needs to deal with a finely honed propaganda machine that is geared to find any weakness a Democratic candidate has and turn it against them. Add into that mix players from overseas who want to manipulate the elections to achieve one of two goals: ideally get someone elected who will do their bidding, or if not that, create as much havoc as possible to rip the country apart from within.
The conservative media is weaker than it was 4 years ago. There just is no real defense for some of the crazy stuff Trump has done and Trump is going to go even more crazy and do even more illegal things after he gets off in the Senate. He could quite easily order the arrests of all the Democrats who stood against him.
The foreign attacks also work best when people aren't aware they're happening and there is a lot of awareness of it now. They will still be out there preying on vulnerable minds.
But handing the GOP a Democratic nominee that is a perfect fit for their memes is a gift and it would make winning more difficult.
There is also no perfect candidate in the mix. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were gifted campaigners. Both have the same gift to work a crowd that Trump has, except they also have a lot of substance too (and their magic works on a different type of crowd). Nobody in the race this time has that magic touch. Andrew Yang and Pete Buttigeig are the closest, but the problem is one has no governing experience and the other has a very thin resume. I think the electorate outside the Trump orbit are very hesitant to go with relative people who don't have relevant work experience. It didn't work out that well last time.
The candidate who has thus far seemed most resistant to meme attacks is Joe Biden because people know him the best. He has held the highest profile gig of all the candidates and he isn't scary. I know a lot of the Twitter Democrats hate him because he has been so connected to the credit card industry, and other things in his record in the Senate, but job #1 is beat Trump. Period. Any of the failings of a corporate friendly Democrat is survivable for 4 years if they are going to make the reforms necessary to ensure that nobody like Trump gets anywhere close to the presidency.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the better. I lean towards Biden only because I think he's got both the best chance to beat Trump and the best chance of beating Trump big. The individual state polls show Bernie doing OK in a lot of purple states, but Biden tends to do the best in those states. A candidate that gets a million more votes in California, but turns off voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania is setting up for a repeat of 2016. Who cares if California loathes the Democratic nominee, whoever the nominee is, they will probably win California anyway and it's worth 53 EV whether you win 51/49 of 80/20.
Overall I'm not that focused on the nominee fight though. There are some people in the hunt I think aren't experienced enough, some more liberal than I am, all the leaders are a bit long in the tooth for my comfort, and there are a couple (like Gabbard) who I think are too compromised to be president, but in the end, I plan to vote blue no matter who because the alternative is always going to be worse. Even if Trump strokes out on the toilet at 3 AM after eating a bucket of KFC and the Republicans replace him with someone else, that person will still be part of the toxic empire/cult the GOP has become.
I wouldn't have a serious problem with a GOP that was more like the Eisenhower era. There were some jerks in the party then (McCarthy for example), but the Democrats had some unsavory characters too. But the GOP of that era would work across the aisle on most legislation instead of the rare unicorn bill. But that GOP is as extinct as the tyrannosaurus rex. What we have to live with is the party that started mutating with Reagan, metastasized with Newt Gingrich, and became terminal with Trump. The only question is whether the party will just kill themselves or take the country or even the world with them.
