if all of these candidates are going to stand by an interventionist foreign policy, while refusing to support any kind of meaningful form of social democracy, why would i care if they lose to trump, in the end?

i pointed this out in 2016, and it's rung fairly true. if you put 100 issues down on the table, i might agree with hillary clinton over donald trump something like 53% of the time. but, i would take sanders over trump something more like 75% of the time, and sanders over a more traditional conservative candidate (like ted cruz) something like 95% of the time. i might lean a little right on immigration and free speech; nobody is this abstract political position of left or right. see, the twist is that if clinton were running against a cruz or a rubio, that more comfortable distance would open back up again: clinton beats the traditional right 70-30, while she runs against trump as a coin toss. and even a neo-liberal like harris or gillebrandt is likely to do a little better than clinton against trump - maybe you even get to 60%.

the differences where trump blurs the centre are to do with things like trade and foreign policy, although i also should be quick to point out that trump's position often doesn't match his rhetoric. he was also supposed to fund a massive infrastructure project, and hasn't. but, if i'm opposed to what we call "free trade", opposed to foreign intervention and in favour of public infrastructure, does that make me right-wing? hardly. it's the spectrum that's fucked up.

i think that biden presents the same basic problem as clinton, even when you adjust trump for his record. do i think biden would be better than trump? maybe 55% of the time, at most. warren might get 63 or something - and not due to her positions on financial regulation, which i actually think are naive, but due to a slightly better foreign policy. and, these faceless, milquetoast neo-liberal senators - harris, booker, klobuchar, gillebrand, etc - are just going to land somewhere in between, around 60.

but, bernie is still a dominantly preferable candidate, even if i don't agree with everything he says.

so, save your guilt trip about trump winning for the partisan circle jerks. if some non-bernie candidate wins, the fact is that i'm probably going to be pretty rigorously opposed to most of their policy positions, and not able to articulate much of a benefit of them winning.

the greens probably need to look beyond jill stein, and how much rhetorical support i give them is going to depend on who and how they run. but, you should expect me to line up behind a green candidate before you expect me to support another neo-liberal, corporatist democrat.