There’s some unfortunate news coming out of a recent release of polling results from Emerson Polling. According to this data, a notable percentage of Bernie Sanders voters would rather vote for Donald Trump in the general election instead of for many of Sanders’ Democratic primary rivals, including Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg.
Now, it’s really important to take these findings with a grain of salt. Why? The sample size is pretty small. Still, let’s look at some specific numbers. Some 26 percent of Sanders voters said they’d vote for Trump if Warren won the primary. A slightly lower, but still concerning, 21 percent of Sanders voters said they’d vote for Trump if Buttigieg won the primary. Another 17 percent said they’d vote for Trump over Kamala Harris, and 18 percent said they’d back Trump over Beto O’Rourke.
Conversely, however, literally all of Buttigieg’s supporters said they would vote for Sanders if he won the presidential nomination. The great majority of O’Rourke’s supporters (91 percent) were also down to vote for Sanders if the time came. And 98 percent of Harris supporters and 94 percent of Warren supporters said the same.
Sanders polled the best with people between 30 and 49 years of age. He also fared best with people who had a college degree. Interestingly, people who didn’t go to college were most likely to support Joe Biden. Warren did the best with young people aged from 18 to 29 and with those who had completed some college.
In Emerson’s polling, 51 percent of people who supported Sanders voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, 23 percent voted for a third-party candidate, and 7 percent voted for Trump. According to this poll, a whopping 19 percent of Sanders supporters didn’t vote. Other data shows that one in 10 people who voted for Sanders in the primary did vote for Trump in the general election.
How many Emerson poll responders are actually Sanders voters? The total is 29 percent, which is nothing to laugh at. Following Sanders in ranking was none other than Joe Biden (who still hasn’t formally announced his candidacy) with 24 percent. Meaning that the two men got roughly half of the total support.
The rest of the candidates came in at less than 10 percent each. Buttigieg came in third, with 9 percent, and Harris and O’Rourke each garnered 8 percent. Warren came in just behind them at 7 percent, while long shots Andrew Yang and Julián Castro rounded things out at 3 percent each.
The poll of Democratic primary voters was conducted between April 11 and 14.
