Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Ethnography of the Sanders Tribe

Bernie Sanders likes to claim that his campaign is about a new birth of left-wing politics in America, but analysis of who votes for  him shows that this is not really so:
Exit polls conducted in two dozen primary and caucus states from early February through the end of April reveal only modest evidence of ideological structure in Democratic voting patterns, but ample evidence of the importance of group loyalties.

Mr. Sanders did just nine points better, on average, among liberals than he did among moderates. By comparison, he did 11 points worse among women than among men, 18 points worse among nonwhites than among whites and 28 points worse among those who identified as Democrats than among independents.

It is very hard to point to differences between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders’s proposed policies that could plausibly account for such substantial cleavages. They are reflections of social identities, symbolic commitments and partisan loyalties. . . .

More detailed evidence casts further doubt on the notion that support for Mr. Sanders reflects a shift to the left in the policy preferences of Democrats. In a survey conducted for the American National Election Studies in late January, supporters of Mr. Sanders were more pessimistic than Mrs. Clinton’s supporters about “opportunity in America today for the average person to get ahead” and more likely to say that economic inequality had increased.

However, they were less likely than Mrs. Clinton’s supporters to favor concrete policies that Mr. Sanders has offered as remedies for these ills, including a higher minimum wage, increasing government spending on health care and an expansion of government services financed by higher taxes. It is quite a stretch to view these people as the vanguard of a new, social-democratic-trending Democratic Party.
Bernie's support comes mainly from people who are upset about the status quo and see Hillary as the embodiment of that status quo. Not from socialists. This is why he gets so much support from the angriest part of the population, young men.

Of course this is not really a knock on Bernie supporters, since most Americans of all sorts cast their votes for strange irrational reasons.

3 comments:

pithom said...

"However, they were less likely than Mrs. Clinton’s supporters to favor concrete policies that Mr. Sanders has offered as remedies for these ills, including a higher minimum wage, increasing government spending on health care and an expansion of government services financed by higher taxes."

-This all sounds extremely dubious. We know Sanders is a protest vote in places like West Virginia and Oklahoma; these must not be confused with actual Sanders supporters in, say, Michigan and Indiana.

pootrsox said...

In order for your point to be valid, you'd need to point to a bias toward exit polls from "places like West Virginia and Oklahoma" coupled with an omission of exit polls from states not like those places.

I did not see such bias; if it's there, I'd be grateful for some evidence.

Since virtually all the Sanders supporters I know are 50 and older, and since the young folks I know who support him are all pretty much underemployed young men (and women) of European descent who live in places like California and Connecticut, the conclusions both of the article and Dr. Bedell make sense to me.

John said...

Millions of people have voted for Bernie, so obviously there are many types. But consistently age and race are both better predictors of who has voted for whom than ideology.