As we head into Super Tuesday, Bernie has a commanding lead in the polls and has done very well in the contests so far. (The 538 model has Bernie going into the convention with a delegate lead around 2/3 of the time.)
This is pretty consistent with Bernie also polling quite well against Trump. I’d expect the stronger candidates against Trump to also do well in the primary.
That said, Bernie’s theory of the election is a bit exotic. His most vocal group of supporters consists of a “brotherhood” that seems attracted to transgressive politics as much as any particular socialist policy, and Bernie’s campaign itself says it will win by appealing to people who usually don’t vote for Democrats or at all in a way that other candidates can’t.
Intuitively, this is a pretty unappealing argument. Democrats did very well in 2018 by appealing to the shakiest part of Trump’s coalition, which is the professional upper middle class that lives in suburbs of large cities. The winning candidates were mostly boring and generic. So it’s not really obvious why Bernie, who is pretty much trying to do the opposite, polls so well.
Political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla have tried to sort it out. Here’s what they find:
These “Bernie or bust” voters that come off the sidelines for Sanders in our survey are almost entirely limited to one group: Democrats and independents under age 35. These voters are about 11 percentage points more likely to say they would vote for Democrats if Sanders is nominated — and almost all of them say they would not vote at all or vote third party if he’s not on the ballot.
However, the “Bernie or bust” phenomenon appears almost entirely limited to left-leaning young people, who are usually a small share of the overall electorate. This stands in contrast to many theories of Sanders’s electoral appeal: For example, whites without a college degree — a demographic some speculate Sanders could win over — are actually more likely to say they will vote for Trump against Sanders than against the other Democrats. The same is true of the rest of the electorate, except left-leaning young people.
In other words, Bernie has a deep, but narrow appeal, concentrated in a segment of the electorate that isn’t decisive. In England, the Labour party tried a five year experiment with a leader exactly like this. It ended with literally the party’s worst performance in 100 years. Jeremy Corbyn’s catastrophic performance in the downscale North of England gets a lot of attention, but he managed to lose even more votes (see the first table) in the “suburban” areas around London and in Scotland.
The parallels are not exact, since Bernie is much more popular and has a more palatable track record. But this is still something to think about in the run up to Super Tuesday. The Broockman–Kalla article suggests that a world where Bernie does alright in Philly proper, voters on the Main Line stay home, and overall get thumped in Pennsylvania isn’t a totally crazy one to think about.
Update: A few points:
- Broockman and Kalla ran a very large and real survey to test the hypothesis that Bernie was bringing lots of new non-voters in while retaining the voters who usual do vote. They did not confirm it.
- People like Bernie a lot better than they liked Jeremy Corbyn. That’s his main differentiator from Corbyn, but that’s not clearly translating into Bernie attracting swing voters.
- Corbyn lost votes from people who like Brexit and people who did not like Brexit. Both groups found his economic policies not credible or palatable. Since this is basically his main point of comparison with Bernie, you can’t waive it away by saying “Brexit”.