It's not a popular revolution if you can't get the people to show up for you
Last night, only 4% of active registered Iowan voters supported Bernie Sanders. (If you include all eligible adults in Iowa that could have registered to vote, Bernie’s total goes down to only 3% support, but let’s keep it simple and give Bernie a break by using only active registered voters.)
The math is pretty simple, so I’ll run through that first:
The New York Times reports that 171,109 Iowans turned out last night for the Democratic Caucus. Half of them supported Bernie Sanders.
http://www.nytimes.com/live/iowa-caucus-2016-election/
Yesterday, the Iowa Secretary of State released their registration numbers as of 2/1/2016:
1,937,317 total active registered voters. Anyone of those roughly two million Iowans could have shown up last night and caucused for Bernie Sanders.
( 171,109 / 2 ) / 1,937,317 = 4%
http://sos.iowa.gov/news/2016_02_01.html
Bernie Sanders supporters have insisted he’s leading a popular revolution. 4% supporting you and 96% not supporting you is not a popular revolution.
Nate Silver at 538 has written articles showing that, because of demographics, Iowa, New Hampshire and Vermont should be Bernie Sander’s three best states out of all fifty states.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-happens-if-bernie-sanders-wins-iowa/
Yet even in Iowa, the revolution never materialized.
Even in Iowa, where Bernie’s campaign was the hot story, only 170,000 turned out compared to 240,000 when Obama’s campaign was the hot story. That is a gigantic drop in energy.
As I had mentioned way back almost a year ago, before Sanders surged in polls: If Sanders is really leading a revolution, he’ll crush Hillary.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/02/1382028/-Bernie-Sanders-will-crush-Hillary-Clinton-if-left-wing-populism-is-growing
But, sorry to say for many of the strongest populists on here, people just aren’t supporting it.
Iowa showed that Bernie Sander’s message is getting the same kind of mile-wide but inch deep support that Gun Control gets.
Poll after poll show a clear majority of Americans support basic gun control. But Americans won’t show up to vote for it. You can’t run a national campaign with gun control as your central issue because that majority support is made up of people who always find an excuse not to vote, or people who put other issues first and are willing to vote for a politician that disagrees with them about gun control as long as they support their #1 issue.
I’ll give just two different examples I’ve heard over the past year: I overheard one person (R) say they like Medicare-for-all, but Bernie Sanders is pro-choice and they could never vote for a pro-choice candidate. I heard another person (Independent) say she loves Bernie’s stance on cracking down on Wall Street, but Bernie doesn’t have a plan to eliminate federal debt, and all politicians just talk about the debt and never do anything, so she probably wasn’t going to vote at all.
I know it’s frustrating, but that’s how the American electorate works...and we’re stuck with making the best out of, rather than just hoping against hope that some radical revolution is going to change everyone’s mind and turn most of them (or even half of them) into Bernie Sander’s fans.
Frequently Asked Questions: (I’ve seen many Bernie fans on reddit offer these reasons to discount Iowa’s results, so rather than wait for the comments, I’ll just address them here:
Yeah well, the media had a blackout on Bernie, otherwise there would have been a total revolution
There are two issues, tone and exposure.
On exposure, Bernie was on the cover of top news magazines, Bernie was invited frequently to all the major Sunday news shows for in-depth discussions of his campaign, in which he was repeatedly able to give most of his stump speech multiple times. Any google search will show hundreds of articles on Bernie Sanders surging crowd sizes and poll numbers. The Media loves a horserace, and they were quick to show Bernie Sanders appeal. Even non-traditional news outlets like Facebook had stories about Bernie Sanders on the sidebar for facebook users.
Anyone who wasn’t exposed to Bernie Sander’s stump speech was purposefully trying to avoid all news sources for months. Reaching those kind of people requires word of mouth, the Media can’t force people to listen to everything they say.
When it comes to tone: Bernie Sanders received excellent media coverage compared to Hillary Clinton. While Hillary Clinton got more mentions on TV News, all of the excess coverage she received over Sanders was about Bengazi, the email “scandal”, and how Americans think she’s untrustworthy. No one in the Sander’s campaign wants the media to give Bernie Sander’s more mentions if they are all about how untrustworthy he is and how they are investigating scandals.
Any political campaign would LOVE to have the kind and volumne of media exposure Bernie Sanders is getting.
Hillary Clinton’s corrupt Wall Street money bought her the Iowa Caucus
Bernie Sanders campaign stated repeatedly that they would stay toe-to-toe in advertising in Iowa, and they did.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bernie-sanders-ad-spending-surge-coincides-with-rise-in-polls/
Compared to the Republican race, the Democratic ads were tame. In fact the nastiest ads in Iowa for the Democrats were Karl Rove’s attack ads on Hillary Clinton taking Wall Street Money. Bernie was not slimed in TV ads as being Kim Jong-un, and no one brought up those old college writings. The garbage personal attacks were left to the Republican Primary.
Voters in Iowa never cited any attack issue as a reason for their caucus vote. All of the interviews had Bernie supporters talking about “real change” and Hillary Clinton supporters talking about “experience” fighting Republicans.
Why are you including Republicans? I don’t think they could have even caucused for Sanders
First, all of those voters listed can walk in and caucus for Bernie, Iowa allows that and the process takes only a few seconds at the caucus site you’ll be at for over an hour anyway.
Second, and more importantly, Bernie’s campaign and his supporters have always emphasized the popularity of his positions by polls of all Americans, not just Democrats.
In fact, his entire campaign has revolved around appealing to people who aren’t Democrats, as he has acknowledged he’ll need such a change to accomplish his agenda.
Bernie Sanders knows he need a real majority of American’s to win, so numbers of “just Democrats” is pointless for his political goals.
It’s hard to caucus, wait until the primaries, THEN you’ll see the popular revolution.
This is the exact same argument Ron Paul supporters made in 2008 and 2012.
According to Ron Paul supporters, he had a lot of old or unhealthy voters who couldn’t caucus for hours. Also a lot of parents with small kids or other commitments that made it nearly impossible to caucus.
There was one problem with that, the same problem Sander’s supporters have:
There is not one piece of data giving any indication that those voters wouldn’t split the exact same way, or even favor someone else.
It was pretty much just what they told themselves so they wouldn’t lose hope that Ron Paul was going to be President in 2008/2012.
The polls, while not super specifically accurate, were not wildly inaccurate. They gave a good picture of the electorate. Since we’ve established that pollsters are not wildly inaccurate in 2016’s primaries, we can assume that if there was going to be a surge in participation in non-caucusing state, Bernie Sanders would be easily dominating 2-1 over Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, etc. But he’s not.
Oh yeah? Well what about Hillary’s poor turnout?
Hillary Clinton had the usual garden variety politician turnout. She’s your regular politician trying to win a regular election. She’s not leading any revolution.
Bernie supporters have been saying because the revolution will be so overwhelming, he can withstand all the months of slime the media will throw at him once he’s nominated. That the revolution will be so overwhelming that we don’t need Barack Obama voters who were centrists that may stay home, vote third party or switch, we only need all the new far left voters that Bernie is going to bring out
Where were all these new voters that were going to let us abandon all the centrists in Obama’s coalition? They didn’t show up, because they don’t exist.
