Watch: Sanders town hall audience surprises Bret Baier with how much they like Bernie’s health care plan

Bernie Sanders’s Fox News town hall Monday night was the uncomfortable mashup you might expect. If Fox envisioned this as a clash of the ideological titans with Vermont senator representing “democratic socialism” and the Fox hosts representing capitalism, however, they may have underestimated how popular Sanders — and the Sanders platform — would be with the town hall audience.

After Sanders answered an audience question about why government-provided versus private-sector health care by outlining his health care proposal, Baier decided to poll the audience about it, by asking people if they’d prefer it to their current, private-sector-provided health insurance. (That frame evokes Barack Obama’s famous promise that “If you like your health care, you can keep it” — something conservatives and Fox News frequently point to as a symbol of Obamacare’s broken promises.)

The poll ... did not go the way Baier appears to have thought it would.

It’s apparent that Fox didn’t stack the town hall with conservatives or people who hated Bernie Sanders; while the first questioner was a student organizer with the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, the second was a progressive organizer who’d campaigned for Clinton.

MacCallum and Baier asked Sanders the questions that, in general, you’d expect Fox News to ask — like asking about whether the success of his book wasn’t proof that capitalism worked. It seems unlikely that they anticipated such a very enthusiastic response from a studio audience to the idea of government-run health care.

Maybe this proves the central point of Sanders’s campaign rhetoric: that the American people writ large, not just progressive Democrats, really want the government to guarantee them a certain standard of living. Maybe it just proves that Sanders is a good politician who’s skilled at presenting his preferred policies in a way that sounds good to people. Either way, it’s a good illustration of why he’s a 2020 frontrunner.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple reasons that we can't rely only on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on.

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. We can’t do that if we have a paywall.

That’s why we also turn to you, our readers, to help us keep Vox free. If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today?

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via