Politics: WaPo: 52% of Democrats have no problem with a socialist presidential candidate

Obviously, there's a pretty thick vein of socialists thriving within the Democrat Party. Whether you're talking about an honest, open, and committed socialist like Bernie Sanders, or the innumerable secretive "soft-socialists" that make up the top levels of the DNC, it's clear that they have a substantial hold on left-wing power.

Unfortunately for them, if the quiet ones actually admitted their beliefs, they wouldn't have a particularly strong hold on the electorate. As the WaPo reports:

Among Democrats, capitalism and socialism were viewed similarly, with 52 percent of those responding giving a thumbs up. (Slightly more Democrats viewed socialism very favorably, but not to a point of statistical significance.)

If you're thinking "that's a disturbingly high number," you're right. It is. Of course, if this data is correct, it also means that a candidate like Bernie Sanders is doomed right out of the gate. Even if their dislike for Hillary Clinton led Democrats - even those who view socialism unfavorably - to hold their noses and vote for him in the primaries, he'd still never be able to pull the kinds of numbers needed to be anything more than a footnote in the general.

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Of course, once people start pointing out the fallacies of his ideology, some of that 52% base could crumble. That's because, as the WaPo also notes, many of these devout socialism supporters have no idea what socialism actually is.

That's assuming people knew what socialism was. Asked to define the term, one-fifth said it referred to government control of the economy. A quarter said they didn't know. Other research suggests that younger people are both less hostile to the concept and less likely to know what it is, having lived through less of the Cold War.

Great. So 52% would probably vote for it, but a good percentage of them have no idea what, exactly, they'd be voting for. Communism? Socialism? Whatever. It's all the same to Dems as long as you're screaming about higher taxes:

So when Bernie Sanders, avowed socialist, announces his presidential bid on Thursday, he will not have a large pool of Socialists from which to draw support. But he will also probably not have to deal with any ads linking him to Cuba. If in 1990 "they" understood that Sanders' form of socialism wasn't the same as Castro's communism, now, Democrats in particular don't really care.

Regardless, there's a rude awakening in store for liberals who were hoping this would be the year their long-hidden socialist instincts finally went mainstream. Much of their own party, virtually all Republicans, and the vast majority of independents want no part of it. So their candidates will have to keep playing the game where they hide their real agendas behind a capitalist cloak. Which is something that a a guy like Sanders isn't interested in doing. As the WaPo's WonkBlog puts it:

The real question for him is not about the strength of his support among committed liberals, but whether he can persuade moderate Democrats outside of Vermont to vote for him and his radical agenda.

The answer is: "Probably not, but maybe." However, should he pull off a miracle and make it through the primaries, it also means he's doomed to a presidential run largely free of independent and moderate support. A vocal socialist won't be able to walk back decades of rhetoric, and he won't be able to play to the national middle. Whatever support he gets from his radical left-wing base is all the support he'll be able to muster.