Younger Democrats (those under 45) are more likely to be very liberal than older Democrats,3 and Sanders is very popular where these two groups overlap. But very liberal Democrats under 45 make up a small bloc of the electorate (10 percent of the exit poll sample in New Hampshire and 16 percent in both Iowa and Nevada).
But he’s also popular, though not quite so overwhelmingly, with the nonoverlapping parts of these two groups. The entrance and exit polls in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada showed the Vermont senator either leading or tied at the top among voters under 45 who identify as somewhat liberal or moderate, and in New Hampshire and Nevada, he led with very liberal voters who are over age 45. (In Iowa, he was second only to Warren with older, very liberal voters.4 So Sanders’s coalition is not solely age-based or solely ideological; being either young or very liberal makes you likelier to support Sanders, even if you’re not both. [...]
Still, if we had to say what most defines Sanders’s supporters, we would say age. The left-leaning polling firm Data for Progress, in a survey released shortly before the Nevada caucuses that was fairly close to the final results, found that Sanders was winning 66 percent of somewhat liberal respondents under 45, compared to 38 percent of those who are very liberal and over 45. That suggests that younger voters are Sanders’s strongest demographic, even more so than those who are very liberal.[...]
In Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, Sanders was more popular with voters without college degrees than voters with degrees. He was the clear leader among voters without degrees in all three states, but Nevada was the only state where he was well ahead among college graduates. And those two dynamics — Sanders being more popular with non-college-educated voters than college graduates and leading the field among those without degrees — generally also show up in national surveys and polls of upcoming states. In terms of raw numbers, there are probably more Sanders supporters without degrees than Sanders supporters who identify as very liberal, since the former is simply a much larger group. (About half of the voters in the three states that have voted so far didn’t have college degrees, for example, but only 20 to 30 percent of voters in those states identified as very liberal.)
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