The decline of Bernie Sanders
Sanders's 2016 insurgency was an anti-Hillary bid—but this time, he has no boogey(wo)man
What to do when all your supporters are #FakeFans
The Takeaway: Bernie Sanders benefited from anti-Hillary Clinton sentiment in 2016, but without her in the race, a lot of his supporters are going elsewhere. The latest polling has the Vermont Senator slipping into third or even fourth place in the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination (though beware the margin of error). It is unclear what tricks he has left to pull or which groups could provide him with a broader base of support.
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The latest polls do not bode well for Bernie Sanders, the once-presumed nominee for the 2016 race, the would-be natural successor to Hillary Clinton’s party.
Sanders is polling somewhere between third and fourth in the just-released NBC/WSJ poll. (It’s worth noting that he is in a similar position in the polling average.)
Multiple factors mean these topline figures are no guarantee. First is the obvious start: the margin of error on 2020 Democratic polling is huge. Most polls of the 2020 nomination will report a MOE of about 3-5%. But there are also other sources of uncertainty in the polls. If you’re taking a proper account of non-sampling error (things like misidentifying the population, bad weighting schemes, bad voter schemes, etc) then the real MOE is larger, maybe 6-10%.
But since these numbers are malleable, perhaps the bigger story is not in precisely who is supporting Sanders, but who isn’t. I tweeted the following earlier this week:
The Economist’s polling with YouGov reveals Sanders’s weakness: he hasn’t consolidated support among his 2016 voter base. Three-quarters of Democrats who voted for him in 2016 say they’ll support someone else in the 2020 race.
This makes sense; research has identified opposition to Hillary Clinton—driven by sexism, “moderates”, elites or what have you—as a key determinant of vote choice in last cycle’s Democratic primary. Nate Silver had a good state-by-state breakdown of #NeverHillary voters a few months back:
At this point in the primary, it’s not worth speculating about how the race will turn out with any certainty at all. But we can certainly see that Bernie is struggling. And when the conventional wisdom had largely revolved around claims that a large swath of intractable supporters would deliver him the nomination, this is significant.
The hard truth for Sanders is that there are a lot of other candidates with policy platforms just as left-leaning as his that don’t have all the baggage that comes with running a presidential nomination campaign before (well, except for one notable exception) or self-identifying as a (yes, democratic) socialist. He could still win, but that he's only pulling in support from one in seven Democratic primary voters is not a good sign—yet it makes perfect sense (in a social science context).