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Comment by jackmott | Hacker News Reader

The GOP has a lot of work to do for pro-conservative stories to exist again.

They're certainly in a worse state right now, but there's plenty of ammo to use against either side. /r/politics is very much a biased, liberal operation. Forget pro conservative; you'll never see anything on there which suggests any level of impropriety against a democrat (well, aside from the Hillary bashing when Bernie was still in contention.)

The demographics of reddit users probably do lean towards a more liberal/libertarian group, but r/politics certainly has no problem with bashing Democratic party members, employees, or appointees.

A quick search proves this out: there are tons of highly upvoted posts calling out Obama, Holder, both Clintons, Spitzer, Geithner etc. This is actually what fueled a lot of the fervor for Sanders - he brought together the disenchanted Paulite libertarians, lefter-than-Obama liberals, and anti-establishment independents.

Did those posts crop up around the time Bernie was throwing his hat into the ring, or well before?

Many long before. Prior to Bernie, the classic stereotype of a redditor was a Ron Paul supporter and I'm sure it would still be skewing much more conservative if western conservatism hadn't completely degraded into nonsense. The demographics are evening out, but the dominant viewpoint is still a straight, white, college-educated male, which has traditionally been a strong predictor of conservative tendencies.

Ah yes, I do remember the Ron Paul surge.

Well now, yes. But /r/politics has almost always been this way, even when GOP had fairly good candidates (Romney)

Well if you assume Hillary is a conservative...

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