Source: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bernie_Sanders_2015_(1).jpg)
Let’s suppose it’s April 2020, and the New York Times reports that Bernie Sanders has just won enough delegates to clinch the Democratic Party nomination for President. Bernie will face Trump in November for the presidency.
How did he get there? What does a Bernie Sanders victory look like? And who’s a part of a winning Bernie Sanders coalition?
Bernie 2016
We know who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016. Sanders ran on the ‘Sandersista Trinity’: Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, and free college. His voters were young people of all races, left-leaning political independents, wealthier and somewhat older white progressives, and a few conservatives who really disliked Hillary Clinton.
This all came out to about 40-45% of the vote in a two-way race. He lost.
I get that the field’s much larger in 2020. In theory, Sanders could win the exact same votes and win the nomination. But that’s not really how it works. Some of the Bernie 2016 coalition is squishy. Many of the wealthier white progressives would’ve preferred Elizabeth Warren or someone else to Hillary Clinton’s left, and they have plenty of choices this time. The conservative Clinton haters are unlikely to return. What was a 40-45% coalition in 2016 is probably more like a 20-25% coalition in 2020.
The point is that Sanders has to find more vote. He has to expand his base. Since I’m supposing in this post that Sanders has won, that’s where we are: Sanders has expanded his base.
So who joined The Bern?
2020 Polling
Let’s start with some hot Morning Consult poll results covered by The Intercept. Bernie Sanders, as Ryan Grim reports, leads Kamala Harris by a 2-1 margin among black Democratic primary voters. Overall results among all Americans, by the way, show Joe Biden in the lead with 31%, Sanders in second place with 27%, and Harris in third with 11%.
For what it’s worth, this is all pretty consistent, at the moment, with the polling of early states. It’s also consistent with other poll results showing Sanders is very popular with non-white voters. And so we have a starting point. Sanders needs to win over more black voters.
A Winning Bernie Sanders Coalition
The Morning Consult poll gets pretty interesting when you dig into the details. With Democrats making more than $100k/year, Sanders gets only 19% of the vote. With Democrats making less than $50k/year, he’s at 30%. Among people with graduate degrees, Sanders is at 17%. He’s at 30% among people without college degrees. Sanders does reasonably well among both white (25%) and black (28%) Democrats.
Perhaps more interestingly, Sanders is by far the leading second choice candidate among supporters of both Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, two candidates who are reasonably likely to either not run (Biden) or drop out early (Warren). He does comparatively worse as a second choice among Kamala Harris supporters, though even there he finishes second only to Biden.
As the campaign and debates get rolling, all this could change. But current evidence suggests that a majority of Democratic primary voters either support Sanders or would seriously consider supporting him. And given Sanders’s strong appeal to independents and young or first-time voters, we also have reason to believe his early polling underestimates his support.
From all this, here’s what a winning Bernie Sanders coalition looks like: the expected group of young voters of all races and left-leaning independents. But, added to that, a strong contingent of working-class voters across racial lines, particularly lower wage workers without college degrees.
This is a coalition far less reliant on the wealthier white progressives who supported Obama and prefer Elizabeth Warren to Bernie Sanders. But if Warren drops out early, which she’ll almost certainly do if Sanders wins Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders can quickly roll up those votes on his way to the nomination.
Sandersistas as Glassonistas
I wrote a post last year on Cathy Glasson’s campaign for Iowa Governor. She, of course, lost pretty badly. I pointed out right away that she ran as a Sandersista, in the sense that she based her campaign on the Sandersista Trinity.
But in 2020, I think a winning Sanders coalition would look a lot like Glasson’s. That is to say, if Glasson was a Sandersista in 2018, Sanders must become a specific kind of Glassonista to win in 2020.
Glasson showed a lot of strength among low wage workers. In Iowa, those workers are disproportionately white and rural. Accordingly, Glasson did the best in rural counties with lots of low wage workers.
She didn’t really do all that well among wealthier white progressives, most of whom supported Nate Boulton. And then John Norris or Fred Hubbell after Boulton went down in a scandal. If you map this onto the 2020 presidential race, Elizabeth Warren is the Nate Boulton candidate. Her support base is almost entirely white progressives a little older and a little wealthier than Sanders supporters.
That makes Sanders the Cathy Glasson candidate. Of course, again, Glasson didn’t even come close to winning. She built a 20% coalition. Not unlike the one Sanders has right now. But there are reasons for thinking that Sanders has far more potential than Glasson.
Explanation
Why?
One, the national demographics are better than Iowa. While Glasson won some votes among mostly white low wage workers living in rural areas, the low wage worker base is nationally much broader. Sanders needs to win lots of black, white, and Latinx working-class voters nationally, but there are far more of these voters nationally than there are in Iowa. And the polling shows he’s starting to build the kind of support needed to do that.
Two, Sanders has far greater abilities than Glasson to expand the electorate. He brings out left-leaning independents, young voters, and first-time voters to a much greater extent than Glasson ever did. He does so to a much greater extent that pretty much anyone in US politics, possibly ever.
Three, Sanders is running a much broader campaign than Glasson, whose campaign base consisted pretty much entirely of one union. The Sanders movement is genuinely a broad, national movement.
The tentative conclusion is that Sanders can ride an expanded base to the nomination. He has a path.
Difficulties for Bernie Sanders
But there are reasons for thinking this won’t be easy. Frankly it’s not totally clear why Sanders is doing so much better among working-class voters, particularly black and Latinx working-class voters. There are several possible factors.
One, and most depressing for Sanders, is that this might just be an issue of name recognition. What the polling shows is that a lot of working-class black and Latinx voters know who Sanders is and kinda like the message. Whether this translates into actual votes depends on Sanders’s ability to reach out and campaign.
Two, at least so far Sanders has done much more outreach than he did in 2016. That’s paying off. He’ll have to keep at it.
Three, as I’ve said before and others have said, black Democrats are, on average, more conservative than white Democrats and much more conservative than Sanders. There’s a variety of reasons for this (see, e.g., this interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates for an overview of some of the reasons). But while black voters are more liberal than white voters overall, white conservatives tend not to vote in Democratic primaries. Black conservatives do.
While Sanders can, and must, improve his performance with working-class black voters, he’s probably never going to win over conservative and middle to upper middle income black voters. I don’t see any likely scenario where Sanders wins more than, say, 40-50% of the overall black primary vote. And to get even there, he has to do a lot of work on crafting a winning message.
Four, everything depends on Sanders’s ability to drive young voters and independents to the polls. Any weakness in this area, anything from dropping participation to encroachment from, say, Beto O’Rourke, becomes fatal to the Sanders campaign. And fatal very quickly. That’s his core base.
For Sanders to win, a lot of things have to go right.
But we can at least sketch out what ‘going right’ looks like.
