The Sanders Coalition Is Not Quite What We Thought It Was

[wyldwolf]

Phantom white working class voters and the persistence of ‘hostile sexism’ both played a crucial role in shaping the race.

Four years ago, in Grant County, Oklahoma, Bernie Sanders crushed Hillary Clinton, 57.1 percent to 31.9 percent.

This year, Sanders didn’t just lose Grant County — 87.5 percent white, 76.9 percent without college degrees — to Joe Biden, his percentage of the vote fell by 41 points, to 16.1 percent.

Grant County reflects what has become a nationwide pattern in the Democratic primaries, including those held Tuesday night: Sanders’s support among white working class voters has begun to evaporate.

What happened?

A crucial bloc of Sanders’s 2016 voters is no longer a part of the Democratic primary electorate. The remnant of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party that in 2016 voiced its hostility to Clinton by voting for Sanders has now turned to President Trump. Many of these former Democrats — particularly men who hold right-of-center views on race, gender and immigration — cast far fewer of their ballots for Sanders and his progressive policies this time around, compared with four years ago, when they shied away from Clinton’s perceived elitism, her ties to Wall Street, her social liberalism and the fact that she is a woman.

The erosion of Sanders’s white working class support this year raises a related question: Why did Elizabeth Warren’s campaign fail?

One source of the frustration felt by many Warren supporters lies in the fact that the Democratic Party is not as free of sexism as these voters hoped. Support for Warren in Democratic primaries fell in direct proportion to rising levels of what political scientists call “hostile sexism.”

Sanders describes his campaign as a revolution, but in 2016 he had in fact tapped not just left revolutionaries, but also a faction of old-guard white Democrats, in the North in particular, who had not yet followed their southern counterparts into the Republican Party.

For these men and women, a vote for Sanders was a declaration of their animosity to the liberal establishment as it was embodied by Hillary Clinton.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/opinion/sanders-trump-biden.html?fbclid=IwAR0NQzORQWXChnzb-sUw5Pti03jWFGvFgvUxU3LY0lreSSPEcKNqwrlH1M8

[ancianita]

1. Having lived alternately north and south for 20 years, I agree with this.

[mathematic]

2. "Why vote for populist-lite when you can vote for populist right?"

To re-purpose a phrase.

[bucolic_frolic]

3. Then, why is Dem primary turnout larger, and where are those numbers coming from?

I am not comfortable with the premises behind this article. These right-of-center men were supporting Bernie in 2016? What part of his platform agreed with their racism, sexism, and anti-immigration ideal? See! It just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Plus, they are sexist so they left the party, then EW's support collapsed because the "hostile sexism" was so prevalent? They just said the sexists left the party, now it's back? We're a sexist breeding ground?

This article is full of SHIT. Plainly. And I rarely use a 4 letter word.

[Sloumeau]

4. It's not just that some White working class voters switched to Trump.

Bernie Sanders also lost among White Working Class voters that still were part of the Democratic Party. Check out the following from the Intelligencer article entitled, "How Bernie Lost Michigan":

[link:https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/how-bernie-lost-michigan-to-biden.html|]

But the number that leaps off the page in the exit polls is that Biden defeated Sanders among non-college-educated white voters (a.k.a. the “white working class”) by a 50-45 margin, which contributed to a 52-42 advantage for Biden among white voters generally. Bernie famously won the white working-class vote in Michigan over Clinton by 57-42, and won white voters by 56-42. There’s been a furious debate since then as to whether some non-college-educated whites voted for Sanders on their way right out of the Democratic Party and into Trump’s GOP. That’s unclear, but these voters represented the same percentage of the 2020 primary electorate that they did in 2016, despite sharply higher turnout overall.

The swing in Michigan from a Bernie/Clinton 57-42 win among White working-class voters to the Biden/Bernie 50-45 win among White working-class voters represents an 8 point increase from Clinton to Biden along with a whipping 12 point drop from 2016 Bernie to 2020 Bernie. If it was just about losing some White working-class voters to Trump, why didn't Bernie still do better among the White working-class voters that still remained in the Democratic Party?

Here is what I think happened. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump promised that if we moved away from Free Trade and toward Protectionism in the form of things like tariffs, the industry would come back to the Industrial belt. Well, Trump won, he put tariffs on China and changed NAFTA to help the car industry, and automotive jobs are still be shipped out of the U.S., and jobs in the industrial belt have not returned. I think the White working class is saying that the no longer believe in the protectionism that Bernie and Trump were selling.