Also Bernie would have been less popular after he underwent months of general election attacks and scrutiny.
I’ve been a big fan of Bernie since 1990 (that’s, uh, well, let’s not count the years, shall we?) and supported him in the primary, didn’t particularly like Clinton (voted for her anyway), and have to agree. The bar for congressional investigation is very low. Sanders was a Senator when Benghazi happened. What did he know? Why didn’t he do more to stop it? Did he give a secret order to stand down that there’s no record of? Yeah, that sounds ridiculous, but no more so than when those same questions were asked about Clinton. And Sanders used e-mail, therefore crooked Bernie. He’d have gotten the same treatment, and the press would have still gone easy on Trump, grading his whole candidacy on a curve. Maybe he would’ve stayed popular, maybe not. However, if popularity was any sort of measure of electoral success, Bernie may have been going through Senate approval for some executive branch agency right now.