I’ve got news for the Republican establishment.
I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment.
They can’t stop us.
@BernieSanders
180,300 Likes. Feb 21, 2020
On February 28, the day before the South Carolina primary, Sanders still believed his own tweet: “I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. They can’t stop us.” But by midnight of Super Tuesday, four days later, his revolution had vanished into thin air.
Of course, it was not the “establishment” that stopped him, it was the voters — mostly Black voters who have the sophistication that comes from a memory of history. And he would soon learn in Michigan that the White voters he was most counting on were his least reliable supporters.
Going from “they can’t stop us” to dead in the water in just four days shows the kind of self-delusion that we cannot afford to have guiding the party toward November 2020. Because Sanders and a few of his followers are still pushing hard to have a say in reshaping the party’s brand, we had better take a close look at how they lost their way over the last four years.
#NeverHillary
After the first two Democratic primaries, the world’s best meta-pollster, Nate Silver, decided to look ahead. So he asked himself one simple question: What if Sanders did about the same as in 2016 but lost his #NeverHillary voters? The data showed that about 12% of Sanders’ primary voters had picked Trump over Clinton, and another 12% voted for Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, or stayed home with no desire to vote for Clinton. All told, that was about a quarter of Sanders’ voters. That led Silver to a simple conclusion:
Sanders won 43 percent of the popular vote in Democratic primaries and caucuses in 2016. If about a quarter of that 43 percent were #NeverHillary voters, that means Sanders’ real base was more like 33 percent of the overall Democratic electorate.
In other words, he was suggesting that a quarter of Sanders’ voters might not have been for Sanders but only against Hillary, and if those left, he would get only a third of the Democratic primary votes.
So what happened? The coronavirus shut things down, but we have results from 31 states, and they brought in 25 million votes, nearly as many as in all of the 2016 primaries. Back in 2016, those 31 states leaned just slightly more pro-Sanders than average, so they are a good test case.
In those states, Sanders tallied exactly the 33% Silver predicted. Just as Silver thought, Sanders had lost his #NeverHillary vote and, on balance, gained no new votes.
Taking into account some details (like a few missing states in the 2020 data), Sanders lost a bit more than the #NeverHillary vote. But there’s a pretty obvious reason why that might have happened.
Voter Suppression
Unlike primary elections, where you just vote and go, caucuses are a group process with political speeches and sometimes multiple votes. Working people with families often just don’t have the time.
So caucuses suppress roughly 90% of the vote, although there’s a huge variation. This makes it far easier for small, activist pressure groups to swing the vote totals in their favor. And it was obvious to anyone paying attention that Sanders was being helped by that voter suppression in 2016. Now we have proof.
In the 24 states that did not switch from caucuses to primary elections between 2016 and 2020, voter turnout increased 5%. In the eight states that did switch from caucuses to primary elections, voter turnout increased 724%.
In the eight states that stopped suppressing the vote, Sanders’ percentage of the popular vote dropped from 66% to 36%. His vote was cut almost in half. Caucus-based voter suppression had been very kind to Sanders. That may be why he never mentioned that voter suppression problem.
Michigan Goes for Biden
A “political revolution” has been Sanders’ main theme since 2015. The first thing he did after the 2016 Democratic Convention was to found his super PAC, “Our Revolution.” Then he wrote his book, Our Revolution. His next book was Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution.
What a revolution needs most is popular support — it needs “millions of people” to “stand up.” So Sanders talked constantly about how the system discouraged voting. He saw his role as providing a progressive choice and dramatically increasing voter turnout, particularly among the young and the working class.
The story was that he had done this in Michigan in 2016 when he pulled off a surprise upset victory over Hillary Clinton. And the hope was that he could push beyond his 2016 record in 2020.
Sanders wasn’t taking any chances. He was spending more money than any candidate except billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Three weeks before the primary, his campaign was opening five Michigan field offices, in Ann Arbor, Dearborn, Detroit, Flint and Grand Rapids. And it hired ten staff members to supervise volunteers. Biden only had one paid staffer until a week before the primary.
Sanders focused on Michigan from Friday through the Monday before the primary. Biden campaigned there only on Monday. In 2016, Sanders had won 73 of the 83 counties. This time, Biden took all 83 counties.
What Went Wrong? Voter turnout in Michigan had increased dramatically, just like Bernie predicted, but not because of him. It was up 32% in just four years — by a total of 377,000 voters. But Sanders himself actually lost 22,000 voters. And he lost on the issues, not just on electability. Exit polls showed that Biden beat Sanders 58 to 37 on healthcare, 51 to 44 on climate change and 63 to 23 on race relations. The new voters had come out to vote for Uncle Joe. If there’s a revolution happening, it’s Biden’s, not Bernie’s.
The main thing hurting Sanders was likely losing those #NeverHillary voters. They never had been his supporters. Using a sample of 50,000 voters, Nate Silver found that Sanders’ voters who:
- “didn’t think whites benefited from their race” or who
- “wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act”
were much more likely to be #NeverHillary voters. Silver summed it up saying, “#NeverHillary voters were conservative, not super liberal.” And it turns out that the White working class who Sanders was courting is, on average, pretty conservative.
The Big Picture
In the 2016 primaries, Sanders scored slightly less than half as well among Democrats as Clinton did (32.9% to 66.2%). But he scored almost twice as well with independents and Republicans (65% to 34%). Sanders thought that the extra 31% of non-Democrats voting for him were converts to socialism — the first wave of his revolution. That’s still not huge because most Democratic voters are Democrats.
However, Nate Silver found that among Bernie’s new non-Democrat, supposed socialists, almost all of them were just #NeverHillary voters. Half of them left to vote for Trump in 2016, and the other half left Bernie to vote for Joe Biden in 2020. So almost all his supposed new converts to socialism turned out not to be Berniecrats at all, let alone socialists. They just voted for him to spite Hillary. Sanders didn’t win new socialists; he won new sexists.
Double-checking. Sanders is a real socialist (but like all American socialists since about 1900, a democratic one), so his main target is the working class. Because the Democrats have already won over the Black working class, he concentrated on the generally better-off White working class. So it’s worth checking how he fared in Grant County, Oklahoma, which is 88% White and where 77% lack a college degree. In 2016, Sanders won 57% of the Grant County vote. But when the alternative was Joe Biden instead of Hillary Clinton, that dropped to 16%.
Now Clinton is politically quite close to Biden, so the explanation can’t be politics. It was just sexism. In Oklahoma, that was the core of Sanders’ revolution.
Out of Touch
As you’ve guessed, I’m no Berniecrat. So I’ll let Sean McElwee, a dedicated Berniecrat, explain this point. He coined the slogan “Abolish ICE.” Unlike most Berniecrats, he’s a data scientist and checks in frequently with reality.
Just like Nate Silver, he says, “The white working-class voters that Sanders won were mostly anti-Clinton voters.” But he also diagnoses why Sanders and the Berniecrats lost touch with reality.
McElwee says Sanders’ people thought they could win with 30% of the vote. Believing that, he says, “inspired some very pernicious thinking,” along the lines of, “Those people who don’t believe what we believe, we can’t win them [over], so fuck them.” But McElwee concluded, “When we shut ourselves off from conversations about how to persuade voters, we’re making it a lot harder for progressives to win.” Yes, exactly.
How to Win
So how to win is obvious. Don’t shut yourself off from voters who fail one of your purity tests. That’s the tradition of the radical left, and it’s one reason they rarely win.
The way the liberals and moderates win is by accepting people as they are (which is not at all the same as accepting their ideas) and working with whomever they can. If you run people for office who can accept and communicate with their constituents, then you can shift opinions, which is what drives progressive change, and you will also win more votes. That’s what we must do to win in November.
Ripped Apart
