A diary that currently sits atop the Rec list repeats an old false claim. Namely, that Democratic Sanders voters swung the 2016 election to Trump — which gave us the Supreme Court that allowed the Texas abortion law to stand.
It is not true. And post-election analyses by respected organizations disputed that excuse for her defeat.
A few key elements in those analyses:
- A percentage of Sanders supporters were not Democrats and were never going to vote for Clinton or any other Democrat besides Sanders.
- A much higher percentage of Sanders Democrats voted for Clinton in 2016 than Clinton Democrats voted for Obama in 2008.
- Expecting non-Democratic Sanders primary voters to back Clinton in the general election is a specious analysis of the 2016 general, and post-election studies deflate the claim that these non-Dem Sanders primary voters cost Clinton Michigan or Pennsylvania.
This analysis from the highly-respected UVA Center for Politics disputes the claim made in the current Rec list diary.
Did Bernie Sanders Cost Hillary Clinton the Presidency?
A higher percentage of his voters backed Clinton than her voters backed Obama in 2008 or Rubio and Kasich voters backed Trump in 2016.
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There are many proximate causes for Clinton’s loss, and I think you can divide them into three broad categories:
- The Comey Letter: Perhaps the best validated of any of the causes of her loss, there are numerous proximate causes here: her decision to use a private email server, the Benghazi witch hunt, her husband’s visit with Loretta Lynch on the Phoenix airport tarmac, Lynch’s failure to stop Comey, Clinton’s willingness to keep Huma Abedin as an aide, Abedin’s willingness to stay with Anthony Weiner, Weiner’s willingness to send sexually-explicit messages to people other than his wife, Comey’s decision to send the letter to Congress, and so on.
- Exogenous events: These are harder to prove, but you could make the case for any of these items outside of Clinton’s control costing her those 78,000 crucial votes: the media’s constant focus on her email server, President Obama’s failure to nominate a Supreme Court nominee that’d drive African-American or Latino turnout, people voting for third parties, the Russian disinformation campaign against her, etc.
- The Clinton campaign’s own actions: the failure to seriously defend Michigan and Wisconsin, the allocation of resources to stretch states instead of the Blue Wall, the focus on personal appeal (never high for Clinton ) instead of her policy positions (more popular than Trump’s), calling half of Trump voters deplorable, focusing on data analytics and voter modeling instead of actually doing the hard work of turning the base out, generally losing a campaign where she was favored and had more resources.
Certainly all of those are more compelling proximate causes than Sanders, but is Sanders himself a proximate cause? Again, I don’t think he is unless you assume that Clinton would have had no serious primary opposition.
And this analysis from John Sides, a highly-respected professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, in the August 24, 2017 Washington Post highlights many of the same reasons why Sanders Democrats were not the reason for Clinton’s defeat.
Did enough Bernie Sanders supporters vote for Trump to cost Clinton the election?
Another useful comparison is to 2008, when the question was whether Clinton supporters would vote for Barack Obama or John McCain (R-Ariz.) Based on data from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, a YouGov survey that also interviewed respondents multiple times during the campaign, 24 percent of people who supported Clinton in the primary as of March 2008 then reported voting for McCain in the general election.
An analysis of a different 2008 survey by the political scientists Michael Henderson, Sunshine Hillygus and Trevor Thompson produced a similar estimate: 25 percent. (Unsurprisingly, Clinton voters who supported McCain were more likely to have negative views of African Americans, relative to those who supported Obama.)
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Thus, the 6 percent or 12 percent of Sanders supporters who may have supported Trump does not look especially large in comparison with these other examples.
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Perhaps the most important feature of Sanders-Trump voters is this: They weren’t really Democrats to begin with.
Of course, we know that many Sanders voters did not readily identify with the Democratic Party as of 2016, and Schaffner found that Sanders-Trump voters were even less likely to identify as Democrats. Sanders-Trump voters didn’t much approve of Obama either.
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In short, it may be hard to know exactly how many Sanders-Trump voters there were, or whether they really cost Clinton the election. But it doesn’t appear that many of them were predisposed to support Clinton in the first place.
And there are numerous other such analyses from 2017 that came to the same conclusion.
The Sanders voters who didn’t vote for Clinton were never going to vote for her because they weren’t Democrats. So to claim that Sanders somehow cost Clinton the election is unmitigated bullshit. And at a time when we desperately need to be united, such false claims are incredbly divisive sour grapes.
There were many reasons for Clinton’s defeat in 2016. But defecting Sanders Democrats wasn’t one of them, and using the Texas abortion decision to relitigate 2016 is disingenuous and destructive.
It is not surprising that the Clinton diehards are still unable to let go of the of this lie. But to have it repeated now as a reason for the Texas train wreck is utter bullshit.