We’ve been getting so bogged down lately in the dreadfulness of the GOP candidates that it’s easy to forget there are some goodish guys running for president, too. So let’s take a break from complaining about Donald Trump (doesn’t believe there are any Muslim sports heroes, sorry Muhammad Ali) and Marco Rubio (openly lying about terrorism to protect the NRA), and dream blissfully about a world where people pay as much attention to Bernie as they do to the Republican candidates.
Just as with Ron Paul four years ago, Bernie’s managed to tap into a network of online supporters who will drop everything to upvote him on Reddit, but may be see less of a point in voting on a ballot.
Bernie supporters crammed themselves tight into the Time survey, pushing him to 10.2% of the vote. That’s an easy win over the next runner up, Malala Yousafzai (civil rights activist) with 5.2% and Pope Francis with 3.7%. Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz are tied for .5%, probably because most of their supporters are of a demographic that gets Time magazine in the mail.
While he’s very popular with internet-humans, Bernie will certainly not be the actual person of the year, since that’s chosen by editors and announced later this week.
The short list’s already been announced, and some of the names are a bit grim: the head of ISIS, Vladimir Putin, the president of Iran, Donald Trump. For some reason the CEO of Uber‘s on the list, as is Angela Merkel and Caitlyn Jenner and the Black Lives Matter movement.
So, sorry, Bernie. Despite your popularity among people who know how to take online surveys, you might still lose this meaningless title to Donald Trump. Maybe you should have campaigned harder, instead of working so hard on a plan to combat climate change—you know, the thing that may one day wipe out all human life.
Oh, yeah, what about that climate plan? Well, as mentioned in the Morning News, it was unveiled today, and it would cut carbon by 80 percent. That’s staggeringly ambitious, but that’s just Bernie being Bernie.
“People Before Polluters,” they’re calling it. The plan would cut massive corporate welfare payments currently enjoyed by polluters (he calls out Exxon, BP, and Shell by name) and switching to energy sources that don’t slowly poison us all.
In Washington, this would mean shifting the bulk our our power generation to hydroelectric, wind, and solar, which Bernie says would create 63,153 jobs over 40 years. No word on how much it would cost, but in Washington alone he estimates $10.9 billion in health care savings, which isn’t bad. It would also prevent over 800 annual deaths—people who are literally poisoned to death by breathing toxic air from dirty power plants.
Hillary’s climate plan is a bit less ambitious… but also a lot more likely to pass Congress. Once again, this gets to the difference between the two candidates: one’s ambitious but unlikely to win (Clinton has a 28-point lead over Sanders), the other’s popular but sets a lower bar.
But in general, interest in either candidate’s climate plan is still fairly tepid among voters. The bulk of the news coverage about Bernie right now is still focused on his popularity in Time‘s survey. Sure, we’re all slowly choking to death on poison air, but hey some guy deserves a puff piece in a magazine!
