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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

He could only get wins when all of the other candidates didn't collude with each other. Those 6 candidates were election stuffing to take focus off of Bernie, to the point that almost all of them pretended to be for single-payer health care. Pretending to support single-payer is literally the only reason that Harris made the national stage. The only reason Buttigieg entered the picture is because he was a nobody that was put up in the same way to split the liberal-left vote for DNC chair from Keith Ellison.

The idea that Bernie's loss is because he "wasn't that popular" withers under the fact that Biden won the election. Biden wasn't even popular among Democratic Party insiders, they just 1) had no leverage to make him stop his campaign, and 2) their preferred candidates like Harris and Buttigieg were far more repulsive to the public than Biden.

The fairness of voting, auctions, etc. wither under collusion.

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No people really did not like Bernie that much. He was making a lot of promises that he did not have the political capital or chops to deliver on; and a lot of people saw through it.

Not to mention that his cohort of rabid online supporters were as insufferable as those supporting the orange man; thus giving his campaign a similar kool aid drinking cult vibe.

As far as the talk about other candidates forming a coalition against him … that whole line of argument is pretty laughable. This is politics. Success in politics is achieved by building coalitions among constituencies and their representatives to advance policy.

If Bernie were such an effective politician then why was he unable to get someone else to stay in the primary to split the establishment vote?

This is conspiratorial thinking. Here is an alternative: people that want to win adopt popular positions. Then when a candidate drops out their supporters go to the next most similar candidate. Not that complicated. The primaries were vicious, with people like Harris accusing Biden of being a segregationist. They were not pretending to run for president.

The reason Biden wasn't popular among insiders is that they didn't think he could win. People like Obama specifically declined to endorse anyone until the winner was clear so that he wouldn't bias the outcomes and hurt their chances in the general. They fell in line when they saw Biden win the primaries.

Bernie losing could be explained by him simply not being popular. Trump was in a similar position, but trashed the Republican primaries because he was genuinely popular.

> This is conspiratorial thinking.

If you think the idea that politicians were colluding with each other (or cooperating for a more neutral word) is conspiratorial then you should just be disqualified from this conversation.

The difference is that their behavior is proper and makes sense, not an effort to steal attention from Bernie. I'll repeat again, the candidates were absolutely not burning through money, time, and political capital for a pretend presidential run to take attention away from Sanders. They were different flavors of moderate to appeal to the largely moderate base. Even if Sanders was entitled to more attention(he's wasn't), there is no reason to think Amy Klobachar or Cory Booker voters would go for Bernie over Biden when their policies are closer to Biden.

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