Just for the sake of discussion what if Bernie was nominated?

[pnwmom]

104. Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek personally viewed the "ammo" and said it was major.

He said they had a 2 foot thick file of opposition research on him, on a host of issues.

Once the Rethugs got through with him, he wouldn't be nearly as well liked.

It's just wishful thinking to imagine Bernie would have done better. And think hard about it: do you really think the oligarchs of Russia wouldn't have interfered in an election between Bernie and their beloved DT? What would Bernie have offered them? Nothing. They would have treated Bernie the same way as they did HRC - as an obstacle in the way of their favored candidate, DT.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/11/democrats-swallowed-these-two-giant-myths-and-it-cost-them-the-election/

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is a-ok. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Then there’s the fact that Bernie was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words, “Environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 Crime Bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed) and the opposition research folder was almost two-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.) In other words, the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone really attacked him is a delusion built on a scaffolding of political ignorance.