Only if you want to exclude the fact that he ' d have to then go on to the General after the primaries when it ' s inconvenient . Those people are the people who are most likely to be voting for himor not in the General , not some tiny subgroup of the same , and they are his most likely group in the general , where it really matters . On top of that , you seem to be making some odd assumptions about independent voters . They ' re not really a voting bloc they ' re basically just a large subset of partisans who are sick of partisanship , they ' re not really swing voters . They break practically identically to registered voters across demographics . Democratingleaning independents practically always vote along with mainstream Democrats , and ditto republicanleaning independents and considering how polling consistently showed Hillary only narrowly beating out trump with independents , when she did at all , I ' m not so convinced you ' d find much better support with them . I won ' t deny that Bernie would have had better results with independents than Hillary . The demo he polls better with than anyone makes up the majority of the independent vote . Of course , that would be a point that he struggles with against trump , since Trump polls even better than Bernie among the same demographic making up the majority of independents Young , white and male .