That said, I don't think I know any people who were in favor of Bernie who did vote for Trump.

Whereas I do know decent numbers of "conservative-ish" type people who were disgusted with Trump, but never in 10 million years would vote for a Clinton, but would maybe have been willing to vote for Sanders over Trump, mostly because he wasn't Trump or Hillary and sort of overlapped a bit with Joe Biden type blue-collarism while being an outsider. But given the choice between Hillary or Trump, they'd all feel sick and go Trump.

Tangentially, I think there's a large chunk of Democratic party die-hards who still just do not understand how much the Clintons are hated, or who focus on such dislike being unfair rather than just seeing it as reality to contend with.

I think what it comes down to is that most people of any political persuasion are basically politically illiterate and vote their feelings. Sanders and Trump are both:

* not Hillary Clinton;

* male;

* very different from the other options.

For some people, that's apparently enough.

Now obviously that's just campaign talk, but I would go with the smallest glimmer of hope of not killing and displacing another million people in the process.

Believe it. People did not like the idea of voting for Hillary, and voting third party has its own issues.

Also, there was the X factor. People didn't really know what they were going to get with Trump.

You're also forgetting that one doesn't have to vote for Trump to have an effect, many democrats also stayed home or voted 3rd party (especially since media guaranteed that Hilary will win)

Even here posted about her husband's "gift" from Qatar for $1M with a link to Wikileaks and got called a Russian shill just the other day. One user started digging through my comment history found my post from 340 days ago to prove that I spoke Russian, therefore I am Russian, therefore I was working for them. Yes, it was pretty creepy.

As for Bernie (an unknown leftist old white guy) and Trump (a TV personality) it is more interesting to look at it as a phenomenon. They are both a manifestation of the same thing -- a deep dissatisfaction with the current political establishment. On paper they don't have many common positions, but they do have that thing in common.

I think Clinton lost many who would have voted for her because they just weren't excited enough to put their shoes on and go and vote. Mass media and friends were assuring them for months that Trump has no chance of winning. Here is the apparatus she relied on to get her elected which in the end I think was one of the main reasons she lost.

It is really saddening to see how the Democrats turned immediately to anti-Trump rallies and the media is talking about how many scoops of ice-creams he eats and continues with their Russian narrative and wasting an opportunity to capitalize on that enthusiasm and energy of Bernie's followers. If you think about, the fascinating there is not that he didn't win, but how close he got despite the media blackout. Not realizing that, and capitalizing on it, will ensure another failure in the future and figures like Trump will keep winning the election.

When I played football in high school, in some situations our blocking instructions were, "take him whichever way he wants to go". That is, if the defender tries to go around you to your right, take him right; if he tries to go around you to your left, take him left. Russia could do something similar if, say, it wants to remove support from Hillary: If a voter is somewhat to the left of Hillary, move the voter toward Bernie; if the voter is somewhat to the right of Hillary, move the voter toward Trump. That won't work with a dogmatic "I'm with her!" voter - nothing will. But it could work well enough to prevent a win by a candidate that Russia didn't want to win.

But I don't think Russia's real goal was to prevent Hillary from winning. I think Russia's real goal was to undermine faith in democratic institutions. Russia seems scared to death of color revolutions - reasonably enough, since they are revolutions by the people against undemocratic regimes, and despite the presence of elections, Russia is rather undemocratic. Putin therefore wants to undermine the credibility of democracy in other countries, so that Russian citizens look at democracy and see just another empty promise, and therefore don't see any reason to pursue it at home.

No, and while Clinton supporters in the primary frequently made this electability argument, head-to-head polling consistently showed Sanders better than Clinton against Trump.

This, I know, contradicts the naive idea that candidate policy positions and voter policy preferences can be nearly reduced to a simple left-right spectrum (or even a multidimensional one) and voting maps to “which candidates policy position is closest to the voters preferred policy position”, but that model is, intuitively attractive as it might be, completely wrong.

For one thing character issues like perceived trustworthiness make a big difference.