What Just Happened?

The results of yesterday’s “Super Tuesday” primary elections are still coming in so in many cases we still can’t say how many delegates each candidate actually received or even the percentage of votes received. At this point what seems to be true is that Sanders captured a majority of the votes in a very small number of states, maybe just Vermont and Utah, two of the whitest states in the nation, Biden captured a lot of votes and a lot of delegates across the country, and Bloomberg didn’t get a great deal for a half billion dollars of spending, mostly television advertising.

I think we have seen evidence supporting my theory of the election and refuting Bernie Sanders’s. Bernie Sanders’s theory of the election, enunciated often enough, is that he’s going to draw out a reservoir of progressive voters, many young, in numbers sufficient to win the nomination and defeat Trump in the general election. That is not materializing. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg explains:

New political science research by David Broockman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Joshua Kalla of Yale erodes some of that comfort. Broockman and Kalla surveyed over 40,000 people — far more than a typical poll — about head-to-head presidential matchups. They found that when they weight their numbers to reflect the demographic makeup of the population rather than the likely electorate, as many polls do, Sanders beats Trump, often by more than other candidates.

But the demographics of people who actually vote are almost always different from the demographics of people who can vote. That’s where their analysis raises concerns about Sanders’s chances.

According to Broockman and Kalla’s figures, Sanders loses a significant number of swing votes to Trump, but he makes up for them in support from young people who say they won’t vote, or will vote third party, unless Sanders is the nominee. On the surface, these Bernie-or-bust voters might seem like an argument for Sanders. After all, Sanders partisans sometimes insist that Democrats have no choice but to nominate their candidate because they’ll stay home otherwise, a sneering imitation of traditional centrist demands for progressive compromise.

But if Broockman and Kalla are right, by nominating Sanders, Democrats would be trading some of the electorate’s most reliable voters for some of its least. To prevail, Democrats would need unheard-of rates of youth turnout. That doesn’t necessarily mean Sanders would be a worse candidate than Joe Biden, given all of Biden’s baggage. It does mean polls might be underestimating how hard it will be for Sanders to beat Trump.

“Given how many voters say they would switch to Trump in head-to-heads against Sanders compared to the more moderate candidates, the surge in youth turnout Sanders would require to gain back this ground is large: around 11 percentage points,” Broockman and Kalla write in a new working paper.

My theory of the election and electorate in contrast is that black voters are the Democratic Party’s most reliable voters and the candidate most likely to prevail is the one who can attract and bring out the black vote. That isn’t either Sanders or Warren.

What we are seeing so far supports another theory of what happened in 2018. Maybe what made the difference wasn’t a surge of young voters or minority voters but Republicans switching to support Democratic candidates in opposition to Trump. Sanders may be a bridge too far for those voters.