The wife of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has said she thinks her husband could have beaten Donald Trump in the general election.
The wife of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has said her husband could have beaten Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
“I think he would have won. I have very little doubt he would have won because American people wanted change and they weren’t willing to vote for the status quo,” Jane Sanders told the Irish Times in a recent interview.
“Bernie was the candidate for change, Trump was the candidate for change, and Secretary Clinton was the candidate for keeping steady on the path," she explained. "That was not what the American people were looking for.”
And, according to the media outlet, she pointed out the support her husband had from younger people across racial demographics as well as working-class white voters who ultimately cast their ballots for Trump.
Mrs. Sanders’ position appears to have been backed by several major polls conducted around May 2016; a comparison by RealClearPolitics shows each one finding that the Vermont senator would have beaten Trump in a head-to-head race by margins ranging from 4 to 15 points.
Senator Sanders even acknowledged the figures himself, saying on NBC’s 'Meet The Press,' “Right now, in every major poll, national poll and statewide poll done in the last month, six weeks, we are defeating Trump often by big numbers, and always at a larger margin than secretary Clinton is.”
However, after opponent Hillary Clinton clinched the nomination, Nate Silver with the statistics website FiveThirtyEight wrote that “the race wasn’t really all that close and that Sanders never really had that much of a chance at winning.”
Silver then noted that she “beat Sanders by 359 pledged delegates, and 884 delegates overall (counting superdelegates).”
While Clinton appears to have ruled out another run for office, Mrs. Sanders did not close the door on another run for her husband in 2020.