I’ve a lot of discourse online about how the Democratic Party held back Bernie Sanders from becoming president in 2016 & 2020 during the primaries. But my question to that is, are primaries not decided by the voters to get the most delegates? If the people didn’t vote for him, how is that the Dems’ fault?
A counter I see for that is that Dems endorsed his primary opponent to sway the vote. I dont really think that would have much impact on committed voters. Trump got almost no help in the primaries in 2016 and still won.
Is this narrative true and I’m just oblivious?
I feel like we’ve said this to OP already too, but:
However it may have come off, not enough people voted for him to win him the primary. He wasn’t that popular. For reasons mentioned elsewhere.
It’s possible some people who favored Sanders over Hillary voted for Hillary in the primary anyway fearing that she was more likely to win the primary and not wanting to chance unintentionally boosting the chances of someone other than Hillary or Sanders getting the nomination. I don’t know of any polls or anything that might have indicated that was or wasn’t the case. But that still means people didn’t vote enough for Bernie.