What if Bernie Sanders was the Democratic Nominee in 2016?

Going over the 2016 and 2020 elections of a different world.

The U.S. presidential election system is a world-historic mess. It’s also an alternative history writer’s dream. On a regular basis, we are presented with contests where things as minute as the design of a ballot in one county in one state can determine the course of decades. In such a system, it is often hard to tell if even the biggest political developments of an age were inevitable or simply flukes.

Such is the case with the entire post-2016 era of politics, which has hinged on things as microscopic as the decision to send one letter or the tilt of one man’s head. But of all of the contingencies of our time, none loom as large as the one that could not only have stopped the entire Trump era before it began, but birthed an entire political world completely unrecognizable to that of our own.

This is the possibility that Senator Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, was the Democratic nominee in the 2016 presidential election.

How He Could Have Won

When writing any work of alternative history, the best points of divergence from real-world events are always the simplest. For our purposes, this brings us to right before primary voting began in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was in an incredibly vulnerable position. At that point right before the Iowa caucuses, the former Secretary of State’s national lead over Bernie Sanders was smaller than the lead that she had held over Barack Obama at that same point in 2008. In this moment, Sanders faced the same challenge that Obama did eight years prior: winning over the many voters who liked him but were skeptical about his electability. To do so quickly enough, he needed to make a very strong early impression.

In our timeline, Bernie Sanders did not accomplish this in the way that Barack Obama did. While the then-Illinois Senator carried two vastly different states (Iowa and South Carolina) during the early contests, Sanders lost three of four races while only winning New Hampshire, Vermont’s New England neighbor. Although this set of results didn’t exactly knock Sanders out of contention, it did little to diminish Clinton’s aura of inevitability in the way that Obama’s early wins did. While Sanders eventually accomplished both tasks and surged to tie with Clinton nationally later in the campaign, this was too little, too late. In order to have followed Obama’s path to victory, he needed to have established this winning impression far earlier.

This very well could have happened. Of Clinton’s three early primary victories, two—Iowa and Nevada—were close, the former painfully so. Despite a modest polling lead, Clinton only won the Hawkeye State by a miniscule four state delegate equivalents out of a total of 1,397. From the perspective of an alternative historian, shifting such a result to a Sanders win is trivially easy; all you need to do is have him visit the state a few more times at the expense of less competitive ones. In such a retail-heavy state, just a few additional rallies could have been enough to turn a narrow loss into a modest win of about a point or two. Following this, he would have won New Hampshire easily, as he did in real life, before moving on to the primary’s third contest in Nevada.

To the extent that this exercise requires any true leaps of faith, it’s here. Although Clinton didn’t win Nevada by a lot, her five-point win in the state was still far more robust than her paper-thin margin of victory in Iowa. For Sanders to have overcome that deficit, one has to assume that the hype surrounding two back-to-back opening victories would have given him a boost similar to the one he received in real life after he nearly swept every contest held in late March and early April. In that case, he could have surged by just enough to have won the caucus and notched his third victory in a row.

Such a result would have carried massive implications. While not a delegate rich state, Nevada stood out as one of the most diverse states on the map—the kind of place that conventional wisdom said that Sanders could not even compete in, much less win. A victory there would have completely smashed one of the Clinton campaign’s most cherished narratives and boosted him in a way that his wins in Iowa and New Hampshire wouldn’t have. While Clinton would have found a redoubt in South Carolina, even an exceedingly strong victory there wouldn’t have been enough to reverse Sanders’ momentum heading into Super Tuesday. There, a boosted Sanders would have prevented Clinton from achieving the so-called “insurmountable lead” that she achieved in our timeline and kept the race truly competitive.

At this point, Sanders would have been well and truly in the driver's seat. To his great fortune, the vast majority of the contests in the months following Super Tuesday would have been races he either outright won in our timeline or would have been easy wins for him after an additional boost. Each week would have brought news of a slate of new wins and an ever-shrinking Clinton delegate lead, creating a snowball effect among both voters and potential elite-level backers. Fence-sitters who never bothered to reach out to his camp in real life because of his low odds (think Elizabeth Warren) likely would have quickly scrambled to make nice with him. Establishment interests who only got behind Clinton because of her supposedly inevitability would have been very liable to jump ship. By the time that the primary reached the more establishment-friendly states along the Acela corridor, it very well could have been too late for her.

Following a win in the California primary, Sanders would have clinched a victory over Hillary Clinton among pledged delegates. While Hillary Clinton still hypothetically could have won the nomination in this case by winning among superdelegates, we will assume that, by this point, her brand would have been so shot that the establishment wouldn’t have made the effort.

Bernie v. Trump