That may be half of the problem, but the other half is that I think most people think Bernie was just over promising and that they could never have socialized health care, even though most everyone else has it. Much in the same way that the UK couldn’t imagine a country without socialized healthcare, thus voting in Boris Johnson, the US can’t imagine a country with it. We’re just completely stuck. It’s a shame.

It is extremely notable that Biden is the first candidate in ~30 years to win the presidency and have what I'd call a "serious" career in US Federal politics.

There is circumstantial but somewhat compelling evidence that American's don't like Congressional experience. Congress is despised, their wins are thin, their lies are large and their missteps catastrophic.

Big citation needed. I live in Ohio which went red, you do live in a Democratic bubble but it is different than what you imagine it is.

I’d say give Biden a chance.

I've watched Biden live multiple times. He is not as skilled an orator as Obama was, and he indeed clearly has a speech impediment. None of that means dementia.

Either you fell for the old "youtube conspiracy hole", or you're seeing what you want to see.

That said, I am not sure Bernie would have done better against Trump, and the electoral college needs to be retired.

Biden is winning those key states with more votes than Trump did in 2016, and the margins are going to continue to increase.

This narrative is driven almost entirely by the fact several of these states are now allowed to count mail in votes until the start of election day or after polls closed on ED. Without that, the narrative would be talking about Biden's decisive victory in all these states.

GA and WI are probably going to end up with less than 1% difference between the two candidates, and PA might end up at 1 - 2%. Those aren't huge margins regardless of how they got counted.

Drug decriminalization and minimum wage increases are in the party platform already.

Biden beat Bernie when it was 1-1 in the primary, Bernie could only win with the moderate vote split. The voters picked.

Everyone knows that Biden isn’t going to follow through on any of the progressive parts of his party platform. We already had eight years of the the Obama bait-and-switch with him as VP. He’s expressed more interest in appointing actual Republicans to his cabinet than doing any of this.

Crucially, though, voter support for progressive policies and for Biden did not necessarily correlate — most significantly in Florida, which Biden lost and where the state Constitution was amended to raise the minimum wage.