In the never ending war that is the 2016 primary, one number has floated around a great deal. It suggests that about 12% of Sanders supporters voted for Trump in the General Election.
Well, the data is online, and I have started to play around with it in preparation for writing about it.
There were 1,262 people in the file that voted for Sanders in the primary.
Of those 955 voted for Clinton.
Of these 896 voted for Obama
Of these 10 voted for Romney (ie Romney to Clinton)
Of these 24 voted for other (third party)
Of these 25 did not vote
147 voted for Trump
25 for Gary Johnson
73 for Stein
38 other
Of the 147 for Trump:
91 voted for Romney in 2012 (61%)
Of the 73 that voted for Stein
50 voted for Obama
4 Romney
19 voted for Stein
On number not talked about: 49 Sanders voters did not vote in 2012, or voted third party in 2012, but voted for Clinton in 2016.
My suspicion has been there was very little real Sanders to Trump vote, and this provides support for that.
One of my assumptions is that the Clinton v. Sanders race was about the establishment, and the sense that the system was rigged. So this REALLY surprised me. There was little difference between Clinton and Sanders voters on this score. Note as the primary fight went on BOTH sets of voters changed their views on this question.
To my surprise, there was little difference b/w Sanders and Clinton voters on ? of if system is rigged. Note CHANGE in both over primaries pic.twitter.com/bIrrIgOrJh
— dcg1114 (@dcg1114) September 11, 2017
Clinton to McCain crossovers:
Actual: Obama 52.9% to McCain 45.7%
Hypothetical: Clinton 52% to McCain 41%
Back of the envelope calculation:
Obama: 69.5 million
less: 9.04 million (13% not-Clinton, Obama voters)
plus: 9.6 million (16% not-Obama, McCain voters)
McCain: 59.9 million
less: 9.6 (not-Obama, McCain voters)
plus 4.2 (6% not-Clinton, Obama voters)
Adjusted hypothetical percentages: Clinton 56.2% to McCain 43.8%. However, in such a race, McCain wouldn’t have chosen Palin as his running mate and who Clinton would have chosen is undefined. After eight disastrous years of GWB, only a deeply flawed Dem nominee (ie Edwards) would have lost to McCain.
What happened? Looks as if the potential swing voters that were informed by their racism in ’08 stuck with the white guy in ’16.
I think you are assuming the same voters in 2012 and 2016. It would not be a huge surprise that those who bothered to turn out in 2016 would be more favorable to Hillary over McCain than those that turned out in 2012.
And of course, like you say, asking voters about hypothetical choices are notoriously unreliable.
huh? The reference cited polled actual 2008 voters on election day 2008.
Your 2016 Hillary over McCain construct is nonsensical.
Who votes and doesn’t vote in any one presidential election doesn’t change by that much. Who sat out in 2008 were potential Republican voters.
I thought you were talking about 2016 numbers (and hadn’t looked at the original source), so mea culpa on that.
However, the voters do change by a lot between elections, in the context of presidential elections where a 7 point win is considered a landslide. Case in point – Michigan 16 where D counties such as Wayne and Gennessee (Detroit and Flint respectively) saw lower turnout while turnout in the rest of the state increased. I’ve seen similar stats for WI (replace Detroit with Milwaukee, though Madison held up). One might even say that Hillary lost because she planned on the same voters as in 2012 and tried to turn what she considered the centrists among them.
Disagree. The political landscape/national mood/temperature and candidates on offer change far more than individual voters change. At the presidential level and in the absence of third party candidates getting a combined total of more than 2%, the Democratic and Republican nominees begin with approximately 45% in the bag. It’s very difficult for a candidate to drop below that 45% and for the opponent of that candidate to cut into his/her opponent’s 45%.
That remaining 8% is made up of potential swing voters and people that swing from voting to non-voting between elections. So, the universe of actual voters in any one election can vary. (will illustrate below)
If so, it wasn’t a smart plan. The outcome for incumbent presidents running for reelection is either 1) loses or 2) performs better than in his prior election. Obama is an exception — won but did worse than in 2008. Partisan Democrats cited racism for that decline (and practically everything else that Obama got flak for while in office). Yet, how to explain that when between ’08 and ’12 the percentage of white voters declined from 74% to 72% (while the total number of voters declined).
(I’m using the Roper 2008, 2012, and 2016 (preliminary) numbers.)
With only two exceptions, Obama did worse among every demographic group in ’12. The exceptions: 1) Hispanic, increased from 67% to 71% and as a percentage of the electorate increased from 9% to 10% and 2) Asian 62% to 73% and increased from 2% to 3%. As demographic groups that are increasing in size, it would seem foolhardy to blow them off. Disgusting but not foolhardy. Historically, Hispanics and Asians have leaned right or Republican; so a floor for a Republican that trashes Hispanics still exists. Factor in where those two groups live in numbers higher than nationally. Wast coast — and no Republican in 2016 had a chance in CA, HI, OR, and WA. So what if he won TX by a smaller margin? What it cost Trump in CO and NV was made up in whiter and potentially swing states because that trashing was integrated into his theme. It was a dicey proposition in FL, but minority GOP voters there don’t swing that much.
Look at where Obama softened the most between 2008 and 2012.
Men: 49% down to 45% (Romney 52%)
Women: 56% down to 55% (Romney 44%)
White: 43% down to 39% (Romney 59%)
2016
Men: 41% (Trump 53%)
Women: 54% (Trump 42%)
White: 37% (Trump 58%) – (percentage of electorate 70%)
So, Hillary went onto the same slide that Obama was on in 2012. However, Trump didn’t ascend on Romney’s ladder. The key demographic IMO is age. In ’08 Obama was very strong with the 3/4ths of millennials that could vote, strong with the youngest Gen-X, and got that 50%+1 with the boomers (my guess is that a further breakdown would reveal that he was strongest with the youngest boomers and did well enough with the oldest boomers and weak with those in the middle).
By 2008 Gen-X was experiencing the most economic hurt, enough to lean left instead of right. It’s a small generation — “baby bust” and the birth year time frame is only twelve years instead of the more commonly used sixteen to eighteen years per generation. They could also more easily identify with Obama. However, it was in the youngest age bracket 18-29 where Democrats lost the most, 66% in ’08 and down to 55% in ’16. (Romney did better with this age demo than Trump did.) They may like Republicans more than they did in ’08, but they still don’t like them. They feel, and rightly so, that Obama burned them. The ’16 Democratic nominee couldn’t have been worse for that age group.
Both you and sny are making interesting but not really testable claims about who voted. The claims the two of you are making are of a largely ideological nature.`The rather small sample cited in the original blog posting actually provide the sort of data you would need.
Testabe? WTF — elections aren’t carefully controlled science experiments that can be replicated.
Challenge the data I presented and the logical inferences from that data, and stop going after whatever I type here with your “gut sense.”
I have no doubt that a good number of the Sanders to Trump voters were the same voters who voted for Clinton in places like West Virginia in 2008.
Some math: Of the 147 Sanders to Trump voters,
69 Self ID’d as conservative
66 as moderate
16 as liberal or very liberal
Here are the Sanders to Trump voters by percentage of the total of Sanders vote
Very Conservative: 54% voted for Trump
Conservative: 58.75% voted for Trump
Moderates: 14.5% voted for Trump
Liberal: 2.7%
Very Liberal: 1.8%
The idea that a bunch of liberals were so anger Sanders lost and voted for Trump is nonsense.
Of course it’s nonsense. But political partisans on both sides repeat nonsense beliefs and refuse to look at and deal with the freaking facts. This one fits in nicely with Hillary’s claims in her new book (screed?) that Sanders cost her the election (along with Putin-Russia, Comey, etc. and the discovery of her private email server for her official work).
This has been clear for a while all the way back to primary exit polls. Sanders-Trump voters were pretty much Republic ratf***ers trying to interfere with the Democratic primary by voting for somebody they thought would be the weaker candidate. Back in the primaries, there was a substantial section of “Sanders” voters who preferred Trump to Sanders, and they were most common in conservative areas.
That’s bullshit concocted in the bowels of one of the numerous Clinton PR operations. That’s not the behavior of those that bother to show up to vote, particularly primary election voters. The preference is to vote FOR a candidate, and contrary to your bs, voters are allowed to rank order their voting choices.
In all the states where it can be measured, GOP primary election turnout was way up and surpassed that for the Democratic primary. Trump was leading but not by all that much. Yet, you claim a Mr/Ms Trump supporter cast a primary vote for Sanders because ???
The only known 2016 primary cycle rat-fing that took place was the Clinton/DNC/ efforts to end up with Trump as her general election opponent. But that didn’t depend on an army of duplicitous rat-f***ing Democratic voters, although with GOP primary turnout up and Dem primary turnout down, a stronger fictional case could be made for it than your rat-fing fiction. Trump got 90% of the free TV time for the Republican candidates from the day he entered the race. And who made the decisions on that freebie for Trump?
Wonder what the Democratic primary would have looked like if Sanders had received merely 50% of the free TV time for Democratic candidates from the day he entered the race. Hell, imagine if TV/radio had given as much time to the Dem primary as they did the GOP primary in 2015-16. OTOH, Democrats did get more than their fair share in 2008.
from the great white hope alternative to Trump:
What’s the point? That McMullin can talk out of both sides of his mouth?
I believe you nailed it.
So, whose votes was he intended to siphon off? Who put up the money for him to run? That should give you a clue.
Apparently the dangling of huge amounts of $$ and plenty of military arms led to some successful convincing. Congrats to McMullin and the CIA for helping these “moderate rebels”!
Booman Tribune ~ 61% of Sanders to Trump voters voted for Romney in 2012
Is this out of range for what normally happens?
I checked the exit polls in the general election and if I remember correctly 89-90% of registered Democrats and Republicans voted for their party candidate in the presidential election. Presumably supporters of losing candidates in the primary would be less supportive of the primary winner then the supporters of the winner in the primary.
It is lower than usual. But Trump was a particularly disliked candidate so you would expect it to be lower.
Factoring in that this is a small sample and was limited to those that voted for Sanders in the primary, this isn’t unusual. We knew a couple of years ago that some Sanders supporters generally voted GOP in general elections, but there is always a portion of both Democratic and Republican primary voters that may swing in general elections.
What is unknown is why 177 of the Sanders’ voters in the sample didn’t vote in 2012. Other than LIB/GRN, not eligible or not interested? Trump did well with that sub-sample, picking up 29%, Clinton picked up 5%, but 64% were “other,” ineligible, or not interested in the 2012 election. (As only 0.39% went with “other” in ’12, my guess is that almost all of that 177 sub-sample were newly eligible and newly engaged by Sanders.)
It does seem curious to me that Stein only attracted ’12 Obama, Romney, and Stein voters and none from the 177 of ’12 non-voters. A pathetic performance.
This is not surprising, but more Sanders liberals voted for Stein (38) than did Trump (16).
At some point I will organize all of this.
You didn’t supply that breakdown. Although I prefer voting behavior to self-descriptions. For example, why did Sanders attract ’12 Johnson voters? Do they not understand what libertarians stand for or …?
As presented there’s 14% in the Sanders sample that are undefined as to what they did in ’12. What we do know is:
896 – Obama(a)>Sanders>Clinton ((a)net of loss to Stein)
59 – undefined>Sanders>Clinton
955 – Clinton total
91 – Romney(a)>Sanders>Trump ((a)net of loss to Stein)
56 – undefined>Sanders>Trump
147 – Trump total
19 – Stein>Sanders>Stein
50 – Obama>Sanders>Stein
4 – Romney>Sanders>Stein
74 – Stein total
24 – Johnson>Sanders>Johnson
— – one Johnson>Sanders>???
Almost an even split for Clinton and Trump for the undefined>Sanders>X subset.
Do you know if anyone has been able to measure the Romney>Cruz/Kasich/Rubio/etc*>Clinton sub-set? (*excluding Trump)
Have to wonder if this could explain Trump’s better performance with this sample of Sanders’ voters and the high “other” and “didn’t vote” in the general election.
Trump’s simplistic campaign plan was essentially “if X is for it, I’ll be against it.” X was often Obama. But going into the GOP primaries, he had to find a way to knock out JEB! with his hundred million dollar PAC as quickly as possible. So, Trump claimed to have been opposed to the Iraq War — which even before GWB was out of office was seen as a disaster by a majority of the public. It worked well against Jeb, in part because nobody could disprove Trump’s claim because he doesn’t have a record on this issue, but Trump’s cafeteria style campaign made him inconsistent on “war and peace.”
For example, Obama supported the Iran deal and therefore, Trump lined up with the GOP and opposed it. (iirc he did that before HRC pivoted to support it.) Trump would be tough on China because everybody else was soft on China. Obama and Clinton were belligerent towards Russia; so, he’d make nice with Russia. That left him in a muddle on the Syrian muddle. But having backed Obama’s Iran deal; so, too was HRC and unlike Trump, she had pushed for ousting Assad when she was SoS.