FiveThirtyEight: Why Bernie Sanders Lost (APR. 8, 2020)

In 2016, Sanders built a passionate bloc of supporters who crowded his rallies and flooded his campaign with money, but lost to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a more centrist, establishment Democrat who had greater appeal among black, Southern and older voters. In 2020, Sanders built a passionate bloc of supporters who crowded his rallies and flooded his campaign with money but lost to Biden, a more centrist, establishment Democrat who had greater appeal among black, Southern and older voters. Sanders got almost no backing from elected Democrats in 2016, and didn’t court the party establishment that much in 2020 either. That was a major barrier to his candidacy — not only did Sanders again get little support from the party elite, but that same elite was instrumental in helping Biden consolidate the field and winnow the race to a two-man contest. [...]

Sanders and his aides also made new mistakes in 2020. There were some clear indications that some of Sanders’s success in 2016 — among white voters without college degrees, in particular — had more to do with anti-Clinton sentiment than strong support for Sanders. But the senator’s advisers seemed to think that Sanders had a unique appeal to white working-class voters that would simply continue in 2020. So the Sanders campaign decided to invest heavily in the March 10 primary in Michigan, a state packed with white voters without a college degree. Biden not only won Michigan easily, but he won overall among white voters without a college degree (and pretty comfortably). [...]

We made this case in more detail in an article earlier this week, arguing that Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the Democratic left were always going to face an uphill climb in the 2020 primary. Democrats’ overriding priority in 2020 has been defeating Trump, and many in the party view left-leaning ideas as something that makes it harder to win over swing voters. The boomlets around former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, neither of whom had the traditional qualifications for a presidential nominee, had the feeling of the Democratic Party desperately searching for a white, male, centrist-y candidate to take on Trump. The party landing on Biden (white male, centrist-y) fits that general narrative. [...]

The way the primary process played out, with Sanders the clear front-runner after the Nevada caucuses and Biden needing a surprising comeback to win, suggests that Sanders could have won in 2020. But it would have been somewhat fluky if a candidate (Biden) who led in the polls for basically the entire race crashed without the party’s establishment able to mobilize behind any alternative. Had Biden not run in 2020 or faltered fairly early, could Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Sens. Cory Booker or Kamala Harris, or even Warren have defeated the Vermont senator in the same way Biden did, by getting into a one-on-one race with Sanders, running to his right and receiving the bulk of support from the party’s establishment? That seems entirely possible.

read the article

The Week: The coming end of Christian America

America is still a "Christian nation," if the term simply means a majority of the population will claim the label when a pollster calls. But, as a new Pew Research report unsparingly explains, the decline of Christianity in the United States "continues at a rapid pace." A bare 65 percent of Americans now say they're Christians, down from 78 percent as recently as 2007. The deconverted are mostly moving away from religion altogether, and the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated — the "nones" — have swelled from 16 to 26 percent over the same period. If this rate of change continues, the U.S. will be majority non-Christian by about 2035, with the nones representing well over one third of the population. [...]

In what remains of the American church, reactions to this decline will vary. Some will see it as a positive apocalypse, which is to say a revealing of what was always true. America was never really a Christian nation. Our government and society have long made choices and embraced values that are difficult, if not impossible, to square with Christianity, so an end of any association between the two is welcome. Likewise, the proportion of Americans who actually practiced Christian faith in any meaningful, life-altering sense was always substantially lower than the proportion who would identify as Christian in a poll. What we're seeing is less mass deconversion than a belated honesty which may be an opportunity for new faithfulness, repentance, or even revival. [...]

Yet as contradictory as it may seem, I'll also suggest left-wing nones may come to find they miss the religious right when grappling with its successor. The New York Times' Ross Douthat has argued the post-religious right of which President Trump has given us a glimpse will be an ugly beast indeed. Polling shows the "churchgoers who ultimately voted for Trump over Clinton still tend to hold different views than his more secular supporters," he wrote last year, including being "less authoritarian and tribal on race and identity. ...The trend was consistent: The more often a Trump voter attended church, the less white-identitarian they appeared, the more they expressed favorable views of racial minorities, and the less they agreed with populist arguments on trade and immigration." In other words, on the right, the decline of Christianity looks to mean the rise of racism, as the communal life of active faith is replaced by darker impulses.

read the article

Vox: 4 winners and 2 losers from the two nights of Democratic debates

Before the debate, there were basically three tiers of candidates in the polls. You had the top three in double digits (Biden, trailed by Biden and Warren), two runners-up around 6 percent (Harris and Buttigieg), and then a whole mess of candidates near the bottom. By the end of both nights, there were only two candidates who seemed like they may have performed well enough to move up a tier: former HUD Secretary Julián Castro and Sen. Kamala Harris. [...]

From that standpoint, he couldn’t have hoped for a better night than the one he had on Wednesday. Castro’s bold idea on immigration — to decriminalize illegal entry — was taken up by other candidates on stage, and then was endorsed by the vast majority of candidates on Thursday. He used his mastery of the issue to pounce on fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke, making O’Rourke look like an empty suit while elevating his own profile (O’Rourke had a really, really bad night in general, but Castro was the single biggest reason). [...]

Sanders’s 2016 presidential run appears to have played a major galvanizing role here, opening up space for a genuinely left-wing shift among Democratic leaders that produced a crop of progressive 2018 stars like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In July 2018, YouGov asked self-identified Democrats whether they wanted candidates for the midterm elections to be “more or less like Bernie Sanders.” Fifty-seven percent said they wanted more Sanders-esque candidates; a scant 16 percent said less. [...]

Social justice, identity politics, wokeness — whatever terminology you want to call the modern left-wing approach to issues relating to historically disadvantaged social groups, it dominated the stage on both nights.

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: Democrats Think Biden Is Electable, But He’s Not Everyone’s First Choice

Beating President Trump in November 2020 is really important to Democrats. Sizable shares of Democrats tell pollsters that a candidate’s “electability” will be a very important factor in their primary vote — even more than the candidate’s policy positions. The problem is that we don’t know for sure what makes a candidate electable. [...]

The table below looks at the difference in each poll between the share of voters who support each candidate and the share who think he or she is the strongest general-election candidate, then averages those differences. It turns out Democrats believe former Vice President Joe Biden is the most electable Democrat — even though fewer voters pick him as their first choice in the primary. [...]

You probably noticed a pattern there. The moderate, straight, white men score best, while the women and the man seeking to become the first openly gay president lose points on electability, as do nonwhite candidates like businessman Andrew Yang and Sen. Cory Booker. Harris ranks particularly low considering her level of voter support, which may reflect the fact that she is both a person of color and a woman. And even Sen. Amy Klobuchar is seen as a relatively weak general-election candidate even though her strong past electoral performances make a good case for her being electable.

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: What Happens If Biden Doesn’t Run — Or Flops?

A Change Research poll released this week offers some clues. It showed Biden well ahead of his potential Democratic rivals in South Carolina, which is expected to vote fourth in the Democratic primary process. (The survey was conducted March 31-April 4.) Thirty-two percent of Democrats said they favored Biden, with Bernie Sanders (14 percent) and Kamala Harris (10 percent) the only other candidates in double digits. Of course, that Biden is leading in South Carolina is not surprising — he leads in basically all polls of the 2020 field, nationally and in the early primary states.

But Change Research also conducted a version of the poll with only declared candidates — leaving out Biden and other potential late entrants1 And that showed a much different, more wide-open race. Sanders was in first with 24 percent, and five other candidates were in double digits: Beto O’Rourke (16 percent), Harris (15), Cory Booker (12), Pete Buttigieg (12) and Elizabeth Warren (11 percent). [...]

That said, the difference in results without Biden is interesting a couple of ways. First, even though Sanders is positioning himself as one of the most liberal candidates in the race and Biden is likely to be cast as one of the more conservative ones, it’s not clear that Democratic voters are seeing those two as representative of different ideological poles within the party. According to polling from Morning Consult, Sanders is the second choice for many Biden voters, and vice versa. That Sanders gained 10 percentage points in the Change Research poll when Biden was not included also suggests that some voters are choosing between those two. Again, that finding could simply reflect that Sanders is the only candidate besides Biden who most Democrats are really familiar with. But it’s also worth considering that voters, at least at this stage, either might not know or might not care about the various candidates’ policy differences, which may already be well-known to party activists and journalists.

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: What Does Beto O’Rourke Believe?

Those stances from O’Rourke include: 

Supporting the abolition of for-profit and private prisons.

Supporting a ban on so-called assault weapons. Supporting the elimination of bail sentences that require people to pay money to be released from jail ahead of trial.

Criticizing not only Trump’s border wall, but also some of the existing barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border and the increase in border security spending over the last decade. (“Yes, absolutely, I’d take the wall down,” he said in February, referring to the border fencing in the El Paso region.)

Supporting the impeachment of President Trump (O’Rourke took this stance during his Senate campaign. I doubt that he will push this issue during his presidential run, but it was somewhat surprising that he adopted it last year. Other Democrats, like 2020 hopeful Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, didn’t take this stance even as they were running in more liberal states than Texas.).

Supporting a proposal to allow anyone who wants to enroll in a Medicare-like insurance plan the option to do so.

Supporting an increase of the minimum wage to $15 per hour.

Supporting marijuana legalization.

Opposing the death penalty.

Supporting NFL players kneeling during the national anthem in protest of racism.

Describing himself as benefiting from “white privilege.” [...]

O’Rourke has also adopted some bipartisan rhetorical flourishes, emphasizing that he wants politics to be less divisive and more focused on finding common ground. And no one should ignore his fairly centrist political history. He wasn’t known as a liberal firebrand and often eschewed liberal positions during his political rise in Texas. In Congress, his voting record put him to the right of the average House Democrat in 2017-18. He was a member of the New Democrat Coalition, a more centrist wing of the party. [...]

I might classify O’Rourke as fairly liberal on issues around culture and identity and left-leaning but maybe not particularly liberal — compared with, say, Sanders or Elizabeth Warren — on economic issues. (Cory Booker and Kamala Harris probably fall in this camp with O’Rourke.) Part of what’s confusing in assessing O’Rourke’s ideology is that the results are different depending on what benchmark you choose. Is he liberal compared with previous Democratic presidential candidates? Yes. Is he liberal compared with the activists dominating the discourse in the party now? No. [...]

And it’s not just O’Rourke’s pro-immigration and pro-Latino stands that would likely be heavily contested in a general election. Ted Cruz, whom O’Rourke unsuccessfully challenged in the Texas Senate race last year, highlighted O’Rourke’s defense of NFL player protests during the 2018 campaign, suggesting that the Republican thought the issue would help him more than it would help O’Rourke. And we haven’t seen a recent presidential candidate have to defend opposition to the death penalty (neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton ran for president as death penalty opponents). But O’Rourke seems to have left himself little wiggle room by saying that his stance is based on “moral grounds.”

read the article

Mic: What Dems still fail to understand about white women voters

CNN exit polling data shows Democratic candidates in key races in Texas, Florida, Georgia and elsewhere won overwhelming support from black, Hispanic and Asian-American women as well as men. But a majority of white women voted for Republican candidates in those same races. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) received 60% support from white women, compared to just 39% for his Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke. Fifty-one percent of white women chose Ron DeSantis over Andrew Gillum in Florida’s gubernatorial race. This political reality has persisted through election cycle after cycle after cycle after cycle over the years, vexing both liberal feminists and Democrats along with their grassroots allies in the process.[...]

However both male and female voters tend to place defending abortion rights low on their list of priorities. Another 2016 Pew study showed abortion placed 13th of 14 top issues for American voters regardless of sex. The economy, terrorism and foreign policy ranked first, second and third respectively among voters’ priorities, the study found. [...]

“Using gender politics for many Republican women can actually backfire,” study author Melissa Deckman said via email on Wednesday. “There are lots of white women who are pro-life and find the GOP more appealing for that reason; or they are more generally socially conservative and oppose LGBT rights, or are concerned about religious liberty. Moreover, they are very much opposed to feminism more broadly, which they view as a philosophy opposed to men, so attempts to frame a campaign about gender equality aren’t going to work.”

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: The 2018 Map Looked A Lot Like 2012 … And That Got Me Thinking About 2020

But it does mean that pretty much every political battle is going to be pitched with an eye toward 2020. And 2020 will be a unique year in that the House, Senate and presidency are all potentially in play.1 How the presidency goes is anybody’s guess. But Trump took advantage of the Electoral College last time around, winning the tipping-point state (Wisconsin) by about 1 percentage point even though he lost the popular vote by 2 percentage points. If Trump has the same edge in 2020, that could go a long way toward winning him a second term. [...]

With those caveats aside, here’s the map you come up with if you count up the popular vote. It ought to look familiar. In fact, it’s the same exact map by which Obama defeated Mitt Romney in 2012, except with Ohio going to Republicans. It would have equated to 314 electoral votes for Democrats and 224 for the GOP. [...]

The pink states — where Republicans won by fewer than 5 percentage points — are also interesting, mostly because they include Texas, where Democrats lost the popular vote for the House by only 3.6 percentage points and Democrat Beto O’Rourke lost his race for the Senate by just 2.6 points. It’s not as though Texas is exactly at the tipping point yet: Democrats came close to winning it, but they didn’t get over the top, even in a pretty blue year. But it probably deserves to be included in a group of Sun Belt states with North Carolina, Arizona and perhaps Georgia (where Democrats lost the popular vote by 6 points) as places where Democrats can compete in a good year. Among these, Arizona was the best one for Democrats on Tuesday night; they currently trail in the popular vote for the House there by 1.7 points and could make up further ground, as a lot of ballots from Maricopa County are still left to be counted.

read the article