Bernie Sanders has a 50/50 shot of winning the nomination and about a 5% chance of winning the general election. His only chance against any of the Republicans is some sort of scandal after the conventions.
The Republicans will nominate whoever wins the primaries. The only way the Party elite can hand it to someone other than Trump is for either Cruz or Rubio to outright beat him, or be in a tie of the sort Sanders and Clinton are in with Iowa.
The irony is that either Trump or Sanders actually winning is likely to be a non-Presidency as they will spend 4 years learning that Congress simply won't go along with their outlandish proposals. Sanders's proposals are mostly economically impossible and Trump's are in some cases
physically impossible. his "deport them all" and "wall" are more like metaphors than anything else; neither one is, as a practical matter, something that can actually be done. Deporting 12 million people simply cannot be done; that's a bigger force than we invaded Normandy with.
He will not, however, be denied the nomination if he legitimately wins it without some close tie. If the Republican party does that, it will be the last Presidential election the Republican party participates in; it will be replaced by some new right-of-center party that might end up being very similar but will result in a lot of very important people being replaced by up and comers that would very much like to take their jobs.
The idea that votes and voters don't matter is completely false because voters only don't matter as long as they think they matter. Once you rip the clothes off the Emperor in public, you cannot go back. Trump is where he is because the voters do matter and all the paniced efforts of the left, the press, and the GOP elders have utterly failed. That is because they are not actually very good at politics; they can only play it as long as the "rules" they imagine to exist are followed. They are not doing well against Trump because he is not running for President and is not conducting a political campaign.
He is MARKETING himself for President and conducting a MARKETING campaing. That's why he lacks specifics and plans - he's not trying to policy-wonk his way to victory; he's selling a product. You don't see academic discussions of proucts on ads, you see snappy slogans. Essentially he's taken the Obama "hope and change" and "yes, we can" strategy and turned it Up To 11.
His major error was failing to participate in the last debate, but that's unlikely to hurt him much from here on - it will be forgotten. The simple fact is that too much of the political class has convinced itself that certain people don't matter because they talk funny or don't think the right things, without considering just how many of those people there are - while at the same time, attempting to extend special privileges to other types of people that talk funny and calling the first group "racists" for objecting.
This country does not work like that. You cannot control the political system from behind the scenes without allowing the people to think they are still in control. Both parties have gotten far too reckless in their attempts to limit what's acceptable in political debate for their voters to accept, and they have created Trump and Cruz and Sanders in the process.
As for being an "atheist that likes civil rights, that sort of thing has created Trump. He represents people that are tired of listening to complaints about victimhood that doesn't exist.
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The Democratic Party has enjoyed having a puppet for the past eight years. They absolutely will not give Bernie the nomination. He has opinions and things he hopes to accomplish. By comparison, the entirety of Hillary's platform is first female president. She will do anything and everything the party leaders want with no questions asked. You are seeing their preference for Hillary now with the grand announcement of her victory.
If Bernie has a convincing lead going into the convention, he will get it or the party will dissolve into chaos and throw the election to the Republican nominee in the process. No other outcomes are possible.