No we didn ' t , here ' s what would have played out if we handed Bernie Sanders the n o m i n a t i o n c o s t d e m o cratspresidentialelection 521044 Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders , straight out of the Republican playbook He thinks rape is AOK . In 1972 , when he was 31 , Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men . Yes , there is an explanation for ita long , complicated one , just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense . And we all know how well that worked out . Then there ' s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid 30 s , and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills , and that he cosponsored a bill to ship Vermont ' s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas , where it could be dumped . You can just see the words environmental racist on Republican billboards . And if you can ' t , I already did . They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue . Also on the list Sanders violated campaign finance laws , criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for , and he voted against the Amber Alert system . His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too , since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs . Worst of all , the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted , Here , there , everywherethe Yankee will die , '' while President Daniel Ortega condemned state terrorism by America . Sanders said , on camera , supporting the Sandinistas was patriotic . The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos I don ' t know what they showed , and the opposition research folder was almost 2 feet thick . The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida . In other words , the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone really attacked him is a delusion built on a scaffolding of political ignorance .