They Claimed Sanders was “Unelectable”
One of the myths told about Bernie Sanders’ “unelectability” was that he failed to even reach his 2016 turnout numbers, but this is not necessarily true everywhere and certainly not true nationally.
The Washington Post wrote an article which was titled “Young voters are failing Bernie Sanders, just as they’ve failed so many before”. In this story, its author makes the case that Sanders did not win the race because Sanders put his bets on young voters turning out to vote, and since the youth never turn out to vote the way Sanders’ predict they ought to, therefore, Sanders was playing a losing hand from the beginning.
Like all articles on The New Haberdasher, this story is presented to you for free. If you like what I do, consider supporting my work with a small monetary contribution at my Patreon and thank you.
Turns out, though, that this article was not from around Super Tuesday, where the Democratic Party, en masse, followed the direction of its Elite and voted to stop the looming red menace on the Left for the sake of the rest of the Nation in true 1950s fashion. It was from 2016, and Sanders’ opponent at the time was Hillary Clinton. It seems that nothing about this narrative has changed, however in the intervening 4 years since the article was penned. The Corporate Media is still stuck on the notion that Sanders lost because his base of young voters did not turn out in large enough numbers to put him over in the primary elections.
The argument goes, especially on MSNBC, that Sanders’ entire raison d’être was that Sanders could activate masses of new voters necessary to neutralize Trump’s incumbent advantage, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. He failed to do so, and therefore had no reason to continue on in the race after Super Tuesday, and the race should have been over then — no further votes were needed. The implications are that the small d democratic process has in fact, once again, selected the nominee, and because it was selected “democratically,” therefore it is the correct choice.
Let’s leave alone, for a second, the fact that there are huge structural barriers to young people voting in a way that reflects their nominal strength in society. The Atlantic did a nice piece on this which you all should take a look at. Let’s also, for a second ignore the fact that the entire Democratic Party elite was aligned to deny Sanders even a fair shot in the primaries, and that “Stop Bernie” was the rallying cry from just after the Nevada Caucuses onward. It was the same tactic they ran in 2016, as well, and it is insane to think that anything would be different this time around. There’s even some evidence that denying Sanders a fair shot was revenge for 2016, launched by powerful Clinton-aligned elements that still dominate the Party, and broadcasted by Clinton herself in a widely watched Hulu documentary released just prior to the start of voting.
The official efforts to keep his voters from reaching the polls, to report the count of votes in the states where he did well in a timely fashion and to deny him any kind of institutional support while pledging it to their chosen “non-Bernie” alternative are well documented. But hey, as they say, “that’s politics.”
What I want to focus on is a small part of the narrative, one that seems to be ignored without any challenge, but when you place it under even the tiniest amount of scrutiny, it falls apart.
I’m talking about the claim that Sanders was not electable because he couldn’t even increase his own turnout totals over 2016. I heard this argument repeated to me today soon after Sanders suspended his campaign, effectively ceding the field to Joe Biden, and virtually guaranteeing him the nomination in the fall. So I decided to investigate the matter. I decided to create a very simple plausibility study.
Hypothesis: Sanders’ candidacy failed because he underperformed in terms of voter turnout, compared to the 2016 primaries.
To test the hypothesis, I built a simple dataset. I looked specifically at contests which have already been concluded so far this year with the exception of Wisconsin, because we do not have results from the 2020 contest at the time I am writing this. I included both his 2020 and his 2016 raw vote totals. I then created a variable “Vote” which is a percentage expressed as a whole number — read 68.3 percent — by performing the calculation (2020/2016*100). If this score is over 100, that means that Sanders did better in 2020 than 2016, and if it is under 100, that means that Sanders performed worse. I also created another variable “Delta” by performing the calculation (Vote-100). The Delta is the change in percentage over the year. A negative number means that Sanders lost that percentage of votes, while a positive number means he gained that percentage of votes. It says the same thing, really as vote change, but allows me to look more easily at magnitude of the vote change. Then I averaged Delta and that is the score I am interested in.
The main source for my data was Wikipedia, which I used for all 2020 numbers as well as most 2016 numbers. A few of the 2016 numbers, held in caucusing states which reported not a raw number but a “delegate equivalent” I had to turn to an outside data set compiled by Pirmann, Sherwood and Tevebaugh, who provided county level vote totals for each of the states in the 2016 contest.
A couple of the results I had to leave out of the average. North Dakota was one: They changed their caucus process between 2016 an 2020 and the numbers were not at all comparable. The Pirmann data set did not include a raw figure for 2016, and so the vote result for that election was nonsensical. I also excluded Maine, because while the Pirmann data DID include a raw number for Maine, it said that only 2200 people voted in Maine in 2016, while putting the total closer to 66,000 in 2020, an increase of 3000 percent for Sanders. Clearly a 30x increase was not what happened. So I opted not to use either of these states, but included them under the main dataset. Not only would that result have dramatically skewed the average statistic, but I don’t know that I trust the 2200 number.
Leaving these two observations out actually helps the hypothesis expressed by media commentators: If I include them, it dramatically improves Sanders performance. But they were so strange that they didn’t seem trustworthy (in fact, the ND numbers are not even comparable) so it shouldn’t offend anyone to leave them out.
If my hypothesis is at least plausible, I should see, nationwide, a smaller number of voters across the states that voted compared to 2016. It will be not plausible if I get some other result than that — In short, I will forced to continue to assert the null hypothesis, in that there is no causal relationship between Sanders’ failed candidacy today and his voter turnout rates across the country.
The results are represented in Figure 1. As you can see: Over 28 contests, the average of the Delta scores is 11.954. This means that over ALL the contests held this year, with the exception of the weird ones listed below, Sanders had an average increase in voter turnout of about 12 percent. Consequently, the Hypothesis is rejected: The Independent variable varies in the wrong direction. We have to conclude, based on this data, that there is no causal link between voter turnout and Sanders’ failed campaign.
As you can see here, the range of Deltas goes from -51 percent, in New Hampshire to a +376 percent in Colorado. We can explain these two states at least. In New Hampshire in 2016, Sanders himself from neighboring VT, had the “progressive” lane to himself and it was essentially a two person race, while in 2020 he competed with fellow New Englander Elizabeth Warren for the same block of votes and there were still a half dozen other candidates still in the field. In Colorado this year, there was record setting turnout, and by Super Tuesday, it was a two person race, so Sanders’ vote totals there received the benefit of the massive numbers of voters voting. All other results fall between those two extremes.
Even with these two extremes included, Sanders comes out with a 12 percent higher vote total “nationally” than he got in the same contests last year. At least part of this can account for the fact that several of these contests were held later in the year in 2016, a fact that tends to suppress voter turnout. The case which bucks this trend is Sanders’ vote totals in California. in 2016, California’s primary was held in June, but he still managed to get more votes there than he got there this year when California’s contest was held in March. But it should be noted that California, like several states, does not even have all their votes counted. Which means that the 12 percent Ave. Delta will change, and it will change ALL in Sanders’ favor. It is possible that when all the votes are counted, Sanders will have overperformed 2016 by 13 or 14 percent.
One interesting finding here is that in South Carolina, which was widely touted as the essential nail in Sanders’ coffin, of which Carville said, they saved the Democratic Party, Sanders actually over-performed his 2016 numbers by almost 9 percent. A lot has been made of Sanders’ failure to court black voters in the South, but even in South Carolina, he did slightly better among black voters than he did in 2016, though he won solidly among black voters under 30. The Intercept, on the other hand suggested that on the eve of South Carolina, Sanders had taken the lead among black voters nationally, putting pay to the notion that Black voters as a bloc had rejected Sanders, but asserting that it was at least at that point, still a very open question.
Now: What does this result mean? At the very least, it means that the DNC talking head- and corporate media-driven narrative that Sanders was so unelectable because he couldn’t even turn out the same number of folks that he had in 2016 is false, to a degree. We see significant numbers of states where he in fact DID miss his 2016 vote totals. But in nearly half of contests considered here, he improved on his 2016 vote totals, often dramatically, and none of those improvements have been reported on, to my knowledge.
Instead, the media has almost exclusively focused on how Sanders’ supposed army of young people didn’t turn out to vote for him in the numbers that they were supposed to, a point that Sanders himself acknowledged after Super Tuesday, which to the pundit class, therefore obliterates any case for a Sanders’ nomination. There are a number of reasons why he fell short of completely overwhelming the contest: I didn’t conduct the analysis here, but it is well known that Biden’s vote totals were given an assist by conservatives in the South, including a lot of Never Trumper Republicans who entered the primaries specifically to stop Sanders from getting the nomination, but apparently do not intend to vote for Biden in the fall. In addition, Sanders’ campaign was compared to the Nazis “over running the Maginot Line” on MSNBC and unfavorably to the Coronavirus on CNN.
All of these likely drove the skittish and strategic moderates into the Biden column, boosting his numbers over even what Clinton was able to do in 2016. It is also true that before Super Tuesday, while the “non-Bernie” field was clogged with a half dozen candidate, Biden wasn’t doing well at all. Following his widely expected win in South Carolina, that field suddenly became unclogged, and consequently, aided by the above factors, Biden won easily. But he didn’t win easily because Sanders significantly under-performed his 2016 numbers. One cannot make that argument with any confidence.
This analysis, at the end of it all is very limited to just the one question: Did Sanders lose the contest because he couldn’t turn out his army of supporters, as the corporate media claims? The answer, according to this data is “no”. In certain contests he had trouble. But overall, he significantly improved upon his 2016 numbers, by a measured 12 percent, and possibly more, depending on what final tallies from California and other states say, and depending on the results from Wisconsin. He even improved among black voters and dominated among the Young and Latino voters in the south and west. To claim that he is not electable because he couldn’t even improve on 2016 therefore is not supported by the data.
Like all articles on The New Haberdasher, this story is presented to you for free. If you like what I do, consider supporting my work with a small monetary contribution at my Patreon and thank you.
