Electing Donald Trump Was Not Progressive

[Content Note: White supremacy; homophobia; misogyny.]

John Sides at the Washington Post: Did Enough Bernie Sanders Supporters Vote for Trump to Cost Clinton the Election? A provocative question, without, frankly, a clearly definitive answer.

Two surveys estimate that 12 percent of Sanders voters voted for Trump. A third survey suggests it was 6 percent.

...There is no way to know whether 12 percent or 6 percent or some other estimate is The Truth, and there are enough differences among these surveys that we cannot easily pinpoint why the numbers differ. So we should take these estimates with some caution.

...Even if we assume that the overall percentage of Sanders supporters who voted for Trump was 6 percent and not 12 percent, and assume therefore that we can cut every state estimate in half, the estimated number of Sanders-Trump voters would still exceed Trump's margin of victory.

But again, attach a lot of caveats to that analysis.

Still:

Sanders -> Trump voters…
WI: 51k
MI: 47k
PA: 116k

Trump win margin…
WI: 22k
MI: 10k
PA: 44k

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://t.co/0buUsnsMA9

— G Elliott Morris📈🙂 (@gelliottmorris) August 23, 2017

But the following finding is what I really wanted to highlight, because it knocks down yet another variation on the "economic anxiety" narrative that was so pervasive in explaining lots of voting decisions in the 2016 election:

Schaffner found that what distinguished Sanders-Trump voters from Sanders-Clinton voters wasn't their attitudes about trade, but their attitudes about race. When asked whether whites are advantaged, Sanders-Trump voters were much more likely to disagree than were Sanders-Clinton voters.

...[I]n December 2011, 75 percent of Sanders-Trump voters agreed with this statement: "If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites." Only 16 percent of Sanders-Clinton voters agreed.

Similarly, when how they felt about whites and blacks on a 0-100 scale, Sanders-Trump voters rated blacks 9 points lower than Sanders-Clinton voters. But Sanders-Trump voters rated whites 8 points higher.

The same thing was true for other minority groups. Compared with Sanders-Clinton voters, Sanders-Trump voters rated Latinos 21 points less favorably, Muslims 21 points less favorably, and gays and lesbians 22 points less favorably.

Hmm. I wonder how they felt about women, and what that might have meant for Hillary Clinton. But let's continue to not explore that question.

Anyway.

Naturally, there will be the usual protestations and complaints about "relitigating the election," but this is important stuff to scrutinize given Sanders' determination to reshape the Democratic Party in his own image.

As Sides notes, "Sanders is still being discussed as a front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 2020. New data is shedding light, however, on Sanders's role in the last election — and on how many Sanders voters ended up supporting Trump. It's a question many in the party will be asking about a candidate who may want to compete again for the Democratic nomination."

On that note, here's something from Roy Delfino you might want to read: Ten Reasons Why Bernie Sanders Must Be Stopped.