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Home » Sanders 2016, Sanders 2020

Sanders 2016, Sanders 2020

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s true that in 2016 Sanders got 60% of the New Hampshire primary vote to Hillary’s 38%. It’s also true that it was basically a dead heat in Iowa in 2016 for the two candidates.

How to compare to the 2020 results? After all, in 2016 Sanders was virtually the only seemingly-viable alternative to Hillary. So he got the entire not-Hillary vote. This year, voters are split among a host of candidates. And yet, Sanders is still leading in NH and pretty much won or came to a dead heat (depending on how the votes were counted) in Iowa. He has about a quarter of the Democrat voters in those two states rather than a half. I’d say that’s pretty darn good, considering the size of the field.

But what does it really mean? In other words – in a somewhat parallel situation to Trump and the Republican contenders in 2016 – as the field inevitably narrows, will those votes mainly go to Sanders or to another contender considered less radical?

Are Buttigieg and Klobuchar the Cruz and Rubio of 2020? Not in ideology, of course, but in terms of duking it out for way too long and splitting the vote, so that Sanders keeps winning?

In 2016 I thought if only either Cruz or Rubio (or other contenders) would drop out, all the others’ votes would go to the last Trump-opponent standing, and that person would win. But as time went on, I didn’t see that happening. I saw Trump getting a significant percentage of the votes of each person as that person exited. I began to realize that Trump could get the whole thing.

And I think something similar has a good chance of happening with Bernie. Will it? I certainly don’t know, but I see it as a strong possibility.

Comments

Sanders 2016, Sanders 2020 — 31 Comments

  1. Good question. My sense is that anyone leaving Warren would go to Bernie, Biden’s supporters would go to Buttigieg and Klobuchar, maybe Bloomberg. It also strikes me that Bernie is at the top of his support at 28-32% of the voters. So my guess is that whoever it is that has decent support (upper teens +) that stays in will have a real chance at the other 70%. The question then becomes, can that happen soon enough to get the delegates needed to pass Bernie?

  2. Not arguing this is significant or apples-to-apples but for the record, here are the vote counts (since Neo gave percentages)

    Sanders 2020 76,324
    Sanders 2016 152,193

  3. We’ll have to see what happens with Bloomberg in the mix in South Carolina. Here in NC, I’ve seen some Bloomberg signs and bumper stickers. He’s spending big money. Still, it’s hard to see the Bernie/Warren/possibly other “anti-capitalist” votes migrating to Bloomberg.

  4. Something to ponder –

    Last week, Ace posted a poll that asked supporters of the Democratic nominees whether they would be willing to support a different Democratic nominee if their favored candidate lost the primary. Ace noted that roughly half of Bernie’s supporters said that they would note. Not mentioned by Ace was that there were even more Yang supporters who took that view.

    Now whether that holds up is anyone’s guess.

  5. Total turnout in the Democratic contest was up 17% over that in 2016. It was up 3% in Iowa. I think the population increase in both has been on the order of 1.5% in those years.

  6. During CNN’s New Hampshire coverage Tuesday, they looked at exit poll results and pretty much everywhere Sanders didn’t win, he was either the 2nd or 3rd choice for voters. The suggestion he can’t get more votes than what he’s getting now seems dubious.

    Mike

  7. Sanders becoming the nominee is a perfect opportunity for those democrats not yet divorced from reality to face what the party has become. Faced with that reality, many, probably most will “pick themselves up and hurry along like nothing ever happened”.

    An unwillingness to acknowledge reality forges the chains with which they have imprisoned their minds.

  8. I have it on pretty good authority that if Bloomberg purchases the nomination, half of Democrats will stay home in November. Trump wins in a contemporary landslide.

  10. About 1/2 the advantage in popular votes Hillary ran up in the Democratic nomination donnybrook in 2016 can be attributed to her 3-1 majority among Southern blacks. If I understand correctly, Joseph Biden’s black support in national surveys is suffering severe erosion. The Southern primaries are going to be less of a firewall blocking Bernie than they were in 2016 (especially given how poorly Buttigieg has been performing with Black voters).

  11. It also strikes me that Bernie is at the top of his support at 28-32% of the voters.

    In a binary race in 2016, he corralled 43% of those Democrats who showed up to vote. He isn’t facing the Clinton machine this year. NB other candidates (John McCain, Donald Trump) have done that well in four candidate races,

  12. Should Republicans who want to vote ‘strategically’ chose Biden or Bloomberg?

    Personally I believe MOST Democrats are far-left enough that having Comrade Bernie ( I – Vermont … he’s not even a Democrat ) as their nominee wouldn’t bother them in the least.

  13. “And I think something similar has a good chance of happening with Bernie.” – Neo

    “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” – Twain*

    *https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/

  15. Sanders, despite his idiosyncrasies, is part of the Swamp just as much as Pelosi is; he just looks different to his fans because they don’t know that “democratic socialism” is communism-lite.

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1227589511649079297.html

    …
    The whole point of the sleazy Democrat impeachment scam was to assert the primacy of the permanent bureaucracy over mere elected government. Your votes don’t matter, and if you deplorables vote wrong, the Eternal State will “fix” your mistakes.
    Only those trapped inside a political bubble or social media hall of mirrors could fail to understand how poorly this would play with the American people, when the big story around the world is people losing patience with arrogant and inept elites.
    …
    Many of those people have yet to realize that some – honestly, most – ideologies are inherently hostile to the kind of representation they want, but they definitely grasp that sneering elites who want to “globalize” power so it’s beyond the reach of any electorate are a problem.
    And they definitely understand that supreme power should not be vested in permanent bureaucrats who never have to face the voters, and who very definitely have selfish interests they will gladly abuse their power to protect. They didn’t realize how bad it had gotten until now.
    In America, the revolt against the administrative state really got going under the Obama administration, an ineptocracy of breathtaking arrogance whose every initiative was a hideously expensive disaster. Dems misread this because their media refused to report that “narrative.”
    …
    It’s weird to see the “Resistance” singing hosannas to permanent bureaucrats at the very moment when public confidence in them has cratered. They bizarrely expect people to root for the unelected and unaccountable against the guy they all get to vote for, or against.
    Of COURSE it’s backfiring. The managerial elite and its media staff are baffled. They don’t understand the public at all, and they don’t WANT to. For decades they suppressed a revolt against the elite by convincing everyone it’s impossible. In 2016 voters called their bluff. /end

  16. Tag team.

    Kevin Williamson.
    https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/what-if-its-bernie/#slide-1

    It would take a lot to make President Trump seem like the ‘normal’ candidate in a general election. But Sanders might just pull it off.

    Jonah Goldberg.
    https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/2020-campaign-trump-team-wants-to-bury-joe-biden-boost-bernie-sanders/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in&utm_term=third

    They can’t see how the Trump team is trying to bury Biden and boost Bernie.

  17. Infighting.
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/02/influential-nevada-union-attacks-bernie-sanders.php

    Bernie Sanders might have hoped to receive the Culinary Union’s backing this time around. At a minimum, he might have thought the Union would remain neutral, as it did in 2016.

    After all, the Culinary Union has links with the left. John Wilhelm was the longtime head of UNITE HERE. He spent a decade in Las Vegas building up the local.

    Wilhelm is the cousin of New York’s far left mayor Bill de Blasio (the mayor was born Warren Wilhelm, Jr.). De Blasio and his cousin are close and UNITE HERE worked hard to elect de Blasio and to attack his opponent.

    The Culinary Union won’t be supporting Sanders, though. In fact, it is working to defeat him in Nevada.

  19. “Tag team.“

    Both Williamson and Goldberg can get bent.

    1. They were spectacularly wrong about Trump. Why should anyone think they’re anymore insightful about Sanders?

    2. Those fools had three years to climb down off their high horse when it came to Trump and didn’t do it. They don’t get to use Sanders as a distraction so they never have to admit they were wrong.

    Mike

  20. MBunge:

    Re: “Both Williamson and Goldberg can get bent.”

    Yeah, I sympathize. But I’d still like to know what their alternative reality looks like, and how they can square it with the objective data.

    There’s a missing bit of cultural anthropology work to be done, explaining and classifying NeverTrumpers.

    There is, after all, a spectrum of them. Some of them seem to have flipped from pro-life to pro-abort the moment that Trump became the biggest pro-life president in history. And I’ve yet to see them seriously, realistically grapple with the fact that the government itself tried to carry out a coup against the winner of the presidential election. Some of them actually describe this as a positive good, and talk about Trump as if he were some autocratic leftist dictator from the 20th century. They openly advocate voting for Democrats, not just for the presidency but in the House and Senate, as a way to oppose Trump. They take bold public stances saying the exact opposite of everything they’ve previously said. Jen Rubin and Max Boot are in this category, and I guess Bill Kristol is, too.

    Others seem to still advocate conservative policies, yet have a mental block against voting for Trump, and plan to leave the ballot blank. They acknowledge that he isn’t a dictator; they acknowledge that the Democrats are worse; but somehow think Trump is too evil to remain under consideration as the lesser of two evils.

    And I suppose there’s a third category of persons who started out NeverTrump and, rather than doubling down or descending further into hysteria, have now fallen strangely silent. They haven’t said, “I’m considering voting for Trump,” but they aren’t openly refusing to do so, either.

    I want to understand how these folks got this way.

    Now, I don’t think we can just walk up to them shouting, “What is your major malfunction, numbnuts?” and get coherent explanations in response. Jen Rubin, in particular, suddenly lost the ability to form meaningful English-language sentences when Trump took office.

    But maybe there’s someone who can translate from NeverTrumpish to RealWorldian?

    If anybody can explain to me why, from Jonah Goldberg’s point-of-view, it makes more sense to repeatedly blast his own foot with a .45 instead of, say, taking the Ben Shapiro approach of guardedly favoring Trump while periodically criticizing his Eruptions of Boorishness, well, I sure would like to hear it.

  21. “If anybody can explain to me why, from Jonah Goldberg’s point-of-view, it makes more sense to repeatedly blast his own foot with a .45 instead of, say, taking the Ben Shapiro approach of guardedly favoring Trump while periodically criticizing his Eruptions of Boorishness, well, I sure would like to hear it.”

    I won’t stand in the way of science if you’re trying to understand NeverTrumpers from an anthropological perspective. To me, the dividing lines for NeverTrumpers are fraudulence, intelligence, and self-regard.

    1. Fraudulence: Some of these folks are clearly revealed as never being conservative or right-wing in any meaningful way. Think Bill Kristol and Max Boot. They’re creatures of the Beltway establishment who simply saw easier career paths on the GOP side.

    2. Intelligence: These folks climbed up on their high horse with Trump when they were sure he wouldn’t win and just cannot figure out a way to get down without admitting they were full of crap. This is where I would distinguish someone like Shapiro from someone like Goldberg.

    3. Self-regard: This is where I would separate someone like Jonah Goldberg from someone like David French. French could figure out a way to be less antagonistic toward Trump and Trump supporters but he doesn’t want to. In Christian terms, French has made a Golden Calf of himself and his sense of righteousness. It’s not about Trump or the people or the country. This whole thing is nothing more than one big morality play and he’s the star of it.

    Mike

  22. MBunge: So, how sure are you that your positions aren’t based on fraudulence, intelligence, and self-regard? I’m not particularly impressed with your comments. Nonetheless….

    I like to understand other people and get inside their worlds even if I have reservations about some of what they say. They are human and as Terence, the Roman playwright, said:

    Nothing human is alien to me.

    It’s a useful exercise.

  23. “So, how sure are you that your positions aren’t based on fraudulence, intelligence, and self-regard? I’m not particularly impressed with your comments.”

    I’m not sure I can go on knowing some rando posting on somebody else’s blog is not impressed with me. LIFE NO LONGER HAS ANY MEANING.

    And by the way, EVERYONE’s positions are based on fraudulence, intelligence, and self-regard as well as many other things. None of us are bloodless thinking machines, something which really shouldn’t need to be told to another grownup.

    The thing with the NeverTrump losers which separates them from the rest of us is that they have been proven wrong. Completely, entirely, utterly wrong. The contention “Trump is bad” has not been proven wrong. Perfectly reasonable people can still hold such a belief. Kristol, Boot, French, Goldberg and the rest are totally within their rights to think that. But to claim that Trump is so awesomely terrible that conservatives should prefer literally ANYONE to him? That has been conclusively demonstrated over the last 3+ years to be absolutely WRONG and that’s what makes their varying states of denial and hysteria so confounding.

    Mike

  24. This suggestion from a few days ago, in the Rolling Stone thread, might tie some of the clans of NeverTrumpers together – although he was speaking of Democrats at the time.

    Roy Nathanson on February 11, 2020 at 3:07 pm said:
    I think that the real source of their hatred of Donald Trump is that he is cutting off their access to the trough.

    This was also about Democrats (on the Durham post), but might also cover some NeverTrumpers.

    Richard Aubrey on February 13, 2020 at 5:05 pm said:
    I keep saying it: Someplace in dems’ heads are two belief systems.
    One is the real world system where they actually know what actually happened.
    The other is the one where they force themselves to believe the opposite.

    The friends Richard describes are aptly summarized by Reagan’s “what they know that isn’t so” remark.

  25. Also on the Durham thread – maybe it really is a question for cultural anthropology!

    huxley on February 13, 2020 at 5:47 pm said:
    Humans are wired to survive, not to be rational. Tribalism is real and still important. Even today getting shunned from your social circles is a real threat to survival. It behooves one to pay attention to those connections.

    Rationality is a recent trick, which doesn’t come easy. It is powerful and has become linked to survival but for most people analyzing a logical argument still isn’t up there with having friends and family.

  26. Well, what do you know! The DNC knew lots more about the Iowa caucus app than they let on.
    https://news.yahoo.com/shadow-inc-idp-contract-dnc-documents-224407455.html?soc_src=community&soc_trk=tw

    While the Democratic National Committee over the past 10 days has tried to distance itself from the troubled app that threw the results of the Iowa caucuses into disarray, a copy of the contract and internal correspondence provided to Yahoo News demonstrates that national party officials had extensive oversight over the development of the technology.

    The Democrats’ Iowa caucuses took place on Feb. 3, but the outcome is still in question following a series of issues related to the failure of an app that was supposed to be used to submit results. In the days since the debacle, DNC Chair Tom Perez has criticized the Iowa Democratic Party, which ran the caucuses, and the developer of the app, Shadow Inc.

    An unaffiliated Democratic operative in Iowa provided Yahoo News with a copy of the contract between Shadow and the Iowa Democratic Party. The contract, which was signed on Oct. 14, 2019, and refers to Shadow as the “Consultant,” specified that the company had to work with the DNC and provide the national party with access to its software for testing.
    …
    The contract also specifies that Shadow agrees to “provide DNC continual access to review the Consultant’s system configurations, security and system logs, system designs, data flow designs, security controls (preventative and detective), and operational plans for how the Consultant will use and run the Software for informational dissemination, pre-registration, tabulation, and reporting throughout the caucus process.”

  28. “The DNC knew lots more about the Iowa caucus app than they let on.”

    Gosh, what a surprise.

    (Kinda reminds one of the CCP in its latest coronavirus act; in fact, given Xi Jinping & Co.’s response to this latest epidemic-about-to-go-pan, he could well be a Democratic candidate for president. All he’d have to do is improve his English a bit. And all the Democrats’d have to do is change the rules—one of their specialties—regarding who can be POTUS, which I imagine they’d get around to after “modifying” the Constitution more to their liking…. Yep, a perfect fit.)

  30. Also related.
    The Trumpenfreude is strong with this one.

    https://www.redstate.com/bonchie/2020/02/13/never-trump-faces-the-reality-that-democrats-dont-care-what-they-think-and-its-hilarious/

    Honestly, I kind of get it. [Dem pushback against the NTs] Republicans had to deal with this unearned sense of entitlement and superiority throughout the 2016 election. Now they want to jump into a new party and start dictating who that party should nominate in the very next election? That’s pretty presumptive on their part.

    It also shows an out-sized self-evaluation of their own intellect. These are the same people who got every single thing about 2016 wrong. Why would any Democrat heed their “warnings” about Bernie Sanders when they’ve shown to be awful at political prognostication? The fact that Never Trump are so certain he’ll lose to Trump actually makes me think Bernie might perhaps be the toughest challenger.

    What I do know is that the Never Trump movement currently faces two realities they wish hadn’t formed. One, that they probably will have to vote for a communist to oppose Trump, and two, that Democrats don’t care about their objections. Hilariously, many of them are now adopting the same “anything it takes” attitude they constantly castigate Republicans for when it comes to voting for Trump. Bill Kristol’s The Bulwark quite literally wrote a conservative case for voting for Sanders just yesterday. No one ever claimed these were intellectually honest people.

    Bernie Sanders is the nominee these people deserve.

    They may deserve Sanders as a nominee, but none of us deserve Sanders as a President.

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