Bernie or bust: The Sanders supporters who will back Trump if their man isn't Democratic nominee [Archive]

Will Hunting

04-24-2019, 09:57 AM

Was it ever determined to a degree of accuracy how many Berni Backers did not vote for Shillary?
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-primary-voters-ended-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds

The surveys conducted show that roughly 10-12% of Bernie supporters voted for Trump nationwide (there's always margin for error but a survey of 50k people is pretty solid), and that there were enough Sanders -> Trump voters in MI, PA and WI that would have flipped the election for Hillary if they all voted for her, but all of that is misleading. Most of the Sanders -> Trump supporters polled describe themselves as Conservatives and only 20% of them have a favorable view of Obama, so the Sanders -> Trump supporters were largely Republicans who voted in the Democratic primary one-time because they liked Bernie's message. They were never going to vote for some Hillary/Biden establishment Democrat.

I still think Sanders beats Trump in 2016 if he won the primary, but the above^ is by no stretch indisputable evidence of that. As easily as Sanders probably wins WI, PA and MI, he could have also lost the states like Virginia or Nevada where the Dems rely on a heavily black base.

For context, 25% of Hillary's primary voters in 2008 ended up voting for McCain, and Obama won that election in a landslide. Voter defections from primary to general elections are nothing new, the only reason we're talking about them now is because 1) Hillary wants to be the victim and blame losing on the fact that she didn't get the blindly loyal support of every single primary voter even though no one before her ever did (including Trump in 2016, who won in spite of plenty of primary voter defections) and 2) the Dem establishment is worried about how quickly it's losing its grip on the party so it's trying to demonize the progressive wing by labeling them as the reason elections are being lost.