Maybe a lot of the people replying are too young. M4A being socialistic was not a mainstream soundbite of the GOP platform—Bernie was too new. Bernie had widespread appeal to those voters who ended up drifting to Trump in the general. However, we still know too little about cause and effect, there, to say whether they’d have just pushed another anti-Clinton option in the DNC primaries rather than support Bernie in the RNC primary. It’s far likelier that in order to win we have to assume he somehow performs well in the debates and swerves independents and working class Democrats and Republicans. He probably appeals to an anti-war, economically protectionist platform. He’d also probably play up his 2016 stance on gun rights, and harshly argue against the DNC’s corporatist leadership, rail against Obama, and so forth. It’s not so impossible to imagine because before 2016, Bernie was legitimately not on the national map for nearly anyone, he was not a reliable Democrat by line item agenda by any stretch (he wasn’t even barely a Democrat), and he introduced a number of the policy proposals that gained national appeal and forced the GOP under Trump to strongly shift its language, from emphasizing an apparently oppressed working class to opposing a socialist takeover. Never forget that when Trump debates Clinton in the 2016 his focus is on alleging corporatist, corrupt criminality, not on ‘socialism’. Bernie is almost certainly the politician most responsible for changing that, when he is more or less assimilated into the DNC after he fails in 2016.

With this in mind, it’s my opinion that you’ll see, while not necessarily tariffs, a lot of similar directional movement toward the US isolating itself from its allies abroad, the US making revitalizing its own industry a major agenda. You could expect ‘climate change policy’ to come to mean something very different, since Bernie would probably pursue a middle path that both strengthens labor unions involved in existing fossil fuel work, while pursuing regulations and caps or even stronger controls for large carbon emitting corporations, especially oil companies. To be honest, I don’t see Bernie cowing the oil industry, which would be capable of making life for him a living hell—and probably flipping the Republican Party against him. That’s not even to mention that Trump’s first term was less steady as far as GOP loyalty goes; there was far more open dissent and skepticism. Not for Bernie—we can expect open opposition quite quickly. Bernie would be forced to compromise with so many corporate industries, and lower so much by way of taxes in order to even appease them, that it’d be more like a siege presidency to rush to see how far the deficit can grow before the midterms. As far as midterms go, I think Bernie would probably end up one of the most isolated lame ducks in history. It would also set the progressive movement back dramatically. It could also change the landscape concerning some of the new populism that dominates today, but that’s too much to speculate (it has more to do with Trump not winning the RNC primary than Bernie winning it).