I. Hillary has a big lead in the “popular vote” so far.
I take it that I’m not the only one who’s obsessed by this election season. My personal obsession has taken the form of tracking what is arguably the single most irrelevant statistics in the nomination races of the two major parties: the “popular vote.” So, with an admission beforehand that these stats are all but meaningless, here are the numbers that I have so far:
- Hillary Clinton: 9.1 million
- Bernie Sanders: 6.7 million
- Donald Trump: 7.7 million
- Ted Cruz: 5.7 million
- Marco Rubio: 3.4 million
- John Kasich: 2.8 million
If you want to see the “numbers behind the numbers,” I tried uploading my spreadsheet to a google doc; if the attempt was successful, you’ll find it here: Primary and Caucus Primary Vote 2016.
II. Bernie still has a path forward, though it may be narrower than it appears.
I expected that the “popular vote” reported above was going to be the sum total of this diary (which I’ve been planning to write for a couple of weeks now). But then came Bernie’s week, March 22-26, when he swept five Western State caucuses by overwhelming margins.
Before those wins, I had pointed out a couple of times to anyone who cared to listen that Sanders would have to win virtually every primary going forward by a margin of at least 12 points (56-44) to have a hope of beating Hillary’s pledged delegate total. That seemed unlikely to me, for the simple reason that Bernie had only won 5 states by such margins — and three of those victories included his home state and its near neighbors (NH, VT, ME).
Then Sanders swept the western caucuses, and suddenly the impossible looked possible again. Hillary won big in the Southern states, but those have voted already; no more votes for her to pick up there. Most of the states still in play are in the Northeast, Midwest, Mountain West, and Pacific—regions where Bernie has already shown strength. Could his 50-to-60 point wins on Saturday be harbingers of more yuuge victories in the coming months? Could be, and if so, the election is transformed.
But after a lot of reflection, and a bit of pouring over my spreadsheet, such an outcome seems a bit more unlikely to me. Here’s why:
1) Sanders has shown the greatest strength in small-turnout caucus states. He has won the states that have had a total Dem turnout of under 100,000 votes by an average of 22 points (66% to 34%). In high-turnout primary states, Clinton has dominated so far, winning states with turnouts of 1 million or more Democratic voters by an average of 14 points (57% to 43%).
Going forward, we have only 3 caucuses left that I know of (WY, ND, Puerto Rico), and we have a whole bunch of large primary states. So here’s the challenge for Bernie: he has shown that he can fill stadiums with enough enthusiastic supporters to massively shift a small caucus in which 15,000 votes amount to a big percentage of the total caucus vote. In a state with 1 million + votes, garnering an extra 15,000 here or there is just a drop in the bucket. Can he ramp up the pro-Sanders turnout in a state the size of New York, California — or even the size of Wisconsin, when it’s a primary and not a caucus? Well, the Wisconsin primary on April 5 will give us a clue.
Sidebar: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the states where Hillary wins are “all in the South,” that they “won’t vote for us anyway,” and therefore that “they don’t count.” Quite the contrary. The small-turnout (<100K Dem votes) states where Bernie has done the best include only one potential swing state (NV); the others are either reliably Dem (HI, ME) or Rep (AK, ID, NE, KS, UT). The big (>1M Dem votes) states where Hillary has averaged a respectable win include four likely swing states (NC, MI, OH, FL), one GOP state (TX), and two Dem states (MA, IL).
Update: I posted this late last night, and didn’t express myself here as well as I might have. It is true, as commenters have noted, that Sanders won Michigan, but he did so narrowly (by less than 20,000 votes). If you add up the top seven Dem turnout states, including Michigan, Clinton won them by a total of more than 1.3 million votes. That is 2/3 of her popular vote advantage over Sanders.
Here’s another, perhaps better way to look at it: Of the 32 Democratic primaries and caucuses to date, Clinton has won all but two of the top 16 turnout states. That is: of all the states with more than 350,000 Dem voters, she has only lost Michigan and Oklahoma, and those by less than 40,000 votes each. Altogether she has garnered 2.6 million more votes than Sanders in these 16 states.
Sanders, for his part, has won 12 of the others, the 16 lowest turnout states (less than 350,000 Dem voters). But because they are low turnout, he has netted only 213,000 more votes than Clinton in those states. That’s the math of it!
2) Sanders has shown strength in the North and West; Clinton in the South. The remaining big states are in between those geographic extremes, and it isn’t clear which way they will go. The Sanders upset in Michigan points in one direction, the Clinton upset a week later in Ohio point in the other. Will Wisconsin look more like MI or more like OH? Will New York? Will California look more like Washington or more like Nevada — or Arizona? At this point, your guess is as good as mine, but again, I think Wisconsin will give us a hint.
The key point, again, is that Sanders can’t just win these states by a couple of points, as he did in Michigan. He has to win by 12 points or more, just to have a whisper of a hope. If he wins Wisconsin by 20 points or more, he may have a chance. If he wins it by 10 points or less (or loses it), hmm.
So altogether, all my pouring over the stats (and the demographics and the history and everything else) has left me where just about everybody else who’s looked at it is: Bernie has a path forward, but it’s a lot narrower than those 70 and 80 percent wins last week might make you believe.
III. What really matters.
So, all this is fun, and a great way to waste time and practice spreadsheet skills. But before I sign off, I’ll just repeat: none of this matters. One way or another, we’re going to end up with a great Democratic candidate going up against a horrid GOP candidate; and one way or another, we’ll know — maybe in two weeks, maybe in two or three months — who those candidates are. At that point, we need to bear in mind a couple of things:
- So long as the GOP controls the Congress, or even one house of it, it will be crucial for us to keep a Democrat in the White House — mainly to safeguard the progress we’ve made so far. It may not seem like a lot, but like the water, you don’t miss till the well runs dry. Imagine the long-term damage that one, two, three more Scalias on the Supreme Court could do.
- What we really need to do is to work on every political office below the presidency. I often get the feeling that Dems spend entirely too much time thinking about winning this one race, the presidency, when the House and Senate are equally important…
- ...and when the state and local political races are even more important. The fifty state legislatures, governors, and judiciaries are all going to redistrict (aka gerrymander) their states again in just a couple more years, after the 2020 census. If we remain shut out of power in more than half the states in 2020, that’s bad news. If we can take some states houses and governorships, we could make gerrymandering work for us, not against us.
If I had the slightest idea how to organize anything, I’d spend every waking hour trying to get good people to run for local office at every level, getting good people to run for judgeships where those are elected offices, trying to figure out how to get our people to turn out for mid-term and off-term elections, how to get out the word about ostensibly “nonpartisan” races, etc., etc.
I have to assume that people who do know how to organize stuff recognize these fundamental facts at some level. I just hope they start acting like it, and soon.
Here’s the fine print on my calculations: To get around the fact that the Democratic Parties of the great states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington neglect to give us the vote tallies for their caucuses, I take the total turnout that the Dems report for those state, multiply it by the fraction of the vote that went to Clinton and Sanders, and round down to the nearest 5,000. Not perfect by any means, but I figure it’s better than nothing.
Oh, and for Alaska, I took the trouble to look up the district vote totals reported by the Dem Party of Alaska (which the New York Times and other news outlets haven’t bothered to do).
The one glitchy thing about the totals is that it includes Dem totals for Nebraska and Colorado, where the GOP hasn’t held primaries (and in CO they never will this year; not my problem), and GOP totals for Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and DC. But those numbers don’t change the rounded-off figures shown above.
If you want to compare other estimates of the popular vote (same ballpark, different numbers), look here for Dems and here for GOPers.