re: #16 Targetpractice

No offense, but we want the situation that Bernie himself claims to promote: the ability for the voters to vote for someone whose beliefs/ideals match their own, rather than being forced to hold their nose and vote. If Bernie can’t win in a three-way race, if the vote will be so split between him and a Dem candidate that the Repub will win, then it’s obvious that he is not winning because the people of VT want him, but because they have no other choice.

I don’t share those views: if you end up with a Republican because the Democrat and the left-leaning Independent split the vote, then we are far worse off. This happens in primaries all the time when there are more than 2 candidates: if multiple people who share similar views split the reasonable vote, the winner may not reflect the majority view of the public and may actually be a fringe candidate.

A true story that I told in the past: In the 1990’s my district was very Republican, but the old style socially liberal, fiscal moderate type of Republican. One year, there were 3 candidates in the Republican primary for a state representative: 2 women who were moderates and a very RW man. The 2 women split the vote, and the man won with less than 40% of the vote. The Dems were not running anyone because either of the women would have been a shoe-in for the office and no one expected this result. Of course the results also reflected the low turnout that often arise in many primary races.
In this case the story had a happy ending, because the Dems were able to get someone to run in the general election and she won, but only because the Republican was so extreme.