Well, I agree we work from a baseline of a broken election, but we are quickly moving towards unfixable elections. I mean let's say we see the 4 to 5 billion dollar presidential election in 2016. What comes next in 2020? 8 to 10 billion dollar elections? Then who could ever hope to compete fairly in an election like that without being in the pocket of major industry. A candidate like Bernie Sanders in a general election like that would never stand a chance. To me that is a really severe breach of democracy that honestly scares me a bit.
I wouldn't worry as much. There's a real populist uprising right now; Britain has a socialist running Labor and Europe is contracting to extreme populist positions. Even in the US the populist uprising can be seen on both sides; yeah, Trump is rich but he ain't Koch Bros rich. Besides which, Bernie Sanders isn't exactly a renegade. Dude's been in the Senate for how many thousands of years?
That's honestly what I love about Bernie's campaign. He proposes allof these changes, but he doesn't outright say he is going to do them. His platform is a call to action for the American people. TOGETHER we can bring change that betters the entire country. If you watch the Republican debate, you hear a lot of "If I'm elected I will do this..." which is an inherently false statement as the presidency doesn't work in that capacity. Hopefully Sanders is driving force of the populist movement in the US. In regards to Sanders being in senate. Look at the state he comes from Vermont is pretty liberal...
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It's actually interesting because Vermont has become much more liberal in the last two decades or so. I think prior to that they were severely republican. I think that would probably be the reason for them being a swing state. I honestly thought they had a larger liberal leaning than that though.