This from Nate Cohn in The Upshot blog at the New York Times.
An analysis of Mr. Sanders’s activist base shows that the turnout for Mr. Sanders was overwhelmingly concentrated in the country’s most liberal communities. There were actually more Sanders attendees in Portland, Ore., than in New Hampshire or Iowa. There was little or no activity in many nonwhite and conservative areas that possess the votes and delegates to decide the nomination.
This seems to back up what Kos was saying in his piece on
The Hill and in
his current diary.
Cohn digs into the geographic distribution of the house parties. I'll hit some of the highlight below the fold.
The pattern of Mr. Sanders’s support resembles Mr. Obama’s support from 2008, but with nearly no support from the black voters who decided that election in Mr. Obama’s favor.
Obama's support without the black voters? Lots of people voted for Obama who weren't black, but still, that sounds like Bernie has a LOT of ground to make up.
Mr. Sanders’s challenge among nonwhite and conservative voters has been widely reported. But the geographic concentration of Mr. Sanders’s activist base is striking even in the context of those expectations.
Striking even in the context of those expectations? Wow, that doesn't sound good. But here's what he means:
The South was Mr. Sanders’s weakest region: Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina all sat at the bottom of the list. The turnout for Mr. Sanders — measured by comparing the number of RSVPs with the number of Obama voters — was 12 times as great in Oregon as in Mississippi. There were more attendees in Washington than in the far larger state of Texas.
For everyone who keeps pointing out that Hillary seemed inevitable in 2008, there's this:
There were more attendees in the Seattle metro area than all of the early states — New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina — combined...Mr. Obama won all of these localities in 2008 against Mrs. Clinton, but he only barely won the nomination — despite receiving overwhelming support from black voters. Without the support of black voters, Mr. Obama would have been crushed. If Mr. Sanders can’t broaden his base beyond liberal bastions, that would be his fate, as well.
So Bernie, apparently, has to do as well with black voters as the African-American community organizer from the South Side of Chicago. I don't doubt that Bernie will attract some African-Americans, I know there are African-Americans on this site who support him. But do as well as Obama did with African-Americans? Seems very dubious.
And finally:
Perhaps most symbolic of the challenge for Mr. Sanders was Illinois’s First Congressional District, Mr. Obama’s old stamping grounds on the south side of Chicago. In that majority black district Mr. Obama won 80 percent of the vote in 2012. There, just 10 people were registered for a Sanders event.
There's also a chart on the Nate Cohn blog that I can't seem to grab that shows attendance at the event as a function of the percentage of a Congressional district that was African-American. Basically, the more black the district, the worse the attendance.