Of course, election results are only one way to measure a candidate’s success. I had argued before the primary that Sanders’s biggest impact might be to push Clinton further to the left on the issues. The jury is still out on how much Clinton changed her rhetoric versus her actual positions (see: the $15 minimum wage), as Dave Hopkins of Boston College pointed out. Still, there can be little doubt that Sanders changed how issues were talked about during the campaign. Clinton didn’t try to beat Sanders by tacking toward the center, as Al Gore often did when Bill Bradley challenged him in 2000. Rather, Clinton highlighted issues where she was further left than Sanders, such as gun control.
Sanders’s greatest effect on Clinton’s positioning may have been on trade. Clinton entered the race having once called the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement the “gold standard.” She ended up against it, even though President Obama, whom she hugged closely throughout the campaign, was pushing the agreement. Sanders was resolutely against TPP, and Clinton ultimately flipped to Sanders’s side of the issue. Sanders also got Clinton to back free college tuition at state colleges and universities for all but the top of the income distribution. [...]
Let’s start with the most obvious problem that Sanders ran into: He never caught on with black voters and didn’t improve with them as the primary season went on. Black voters are the base of the Democratic Party. Clinton lost without them in 2008 and won with them in 2016. Clinton won every state where black voters made up at least 10 percent of the population, except for Michigan.1 In the North, Clinton regularly won black voters by 40 to 50 percentage points. In the South, she regularly won them by 70 to 80 percentage points. When you’re losing by this wide of a margin among a voting bloc that makes up somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of your party’s voters, your candidacy is going to have a hard time winning.
Sanders also struggled tremendously with Latinos, who are growing as a percentage of eligible voters. Sanders lost every contest, except for Colorado, where Latinos made up at least 10 percent of the voting eligible population.2 Further, as my colleague Nate Silver calculated, Clinton won 16 of 17 districts3 where Latinos made up a majority, beating Sanders by an average of 32 percentage points.4 Simply put, the two most consequential minority blocs in Democratic politics didn’t feel the Bern.
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