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We discuss the idea that progressives are responsible for Hillary Clinton losing to Donald Trump
Every week we introduce you to an event in American History, policy, and media, then discuss how that historical event impacts the socio-political issues America faces today. We give you The Dig on US History and offer political commentary and opinion, as well as discussion of current news from Progressive perspectives.
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Now my 8th grade social studies teacher Mr Humble taught me things that turns out, after doing my own research, wasn’t exactly the whole story. And this week, we will dive into the topic of Bernie Sanders voters and the 2016 Presidential Election and how this narrative that the Bernie Bros cost Hillary Clinton the presidency is not only going on far too long but also is false. In Mr Humble’s defense, I don’t think he knew the future.
But now, it’s the past, although it certainly seems to be still an ongoing campaign. But lets look at it, starting with outlining the events preceding the DNC convention.
Bernie built a coalition with a populist movement centered around workers rights, healthcare, raising the minimum wage and not accepting money from most PACs. The primary turned out to be more competitive than expected, with Clinton winning 55% to Sander’s 43%, and the races early in the primary were much closer, with Sanders leading at times. After losing California, The Sanders campaign released a video statement on June 16 and announced that Sanders looked forward to helping Clinton defeat Trump, officially endorsing her on July 12.
A week later, the Wiki Leaks story hit
On July 24, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, stepped down as DNC chair after Wiki Leaks exposed emails showing key officials discussing ways to undermine Bernie Sanders campaign. Emails from Schultz herself criticized Sanders for not being a member of the party and saying he would never be president. Schultz had served as the campaign chair for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign against Obama, and arranged her to be featured in a piece by Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast Network early in the primary (in an attempt to highlight Clinton’s deep Christian faith, clearly dogwhistling her as the safer choice for Christians at a time when Obama was under attack for being Muslim). According to NYT, Schultz lost control of the DNC after Clinton's campaign inserted operative Brandon Davis to run day to day operations in June that year.
Clearly, this agitated the Bernie Sanders and his supporters, as Schultz was supposed to be neutral in the primary process and she herself was campaigning for Clinton prior to the convention.
Bernie then released a statement: "Debbie Wasserman Schultz has made the right decision for the future of the Democratic Party," he said. "While she deserves thanks for her years of service, the party now needs new leadership that will open the doors of the party and welcome in working people and young people. The party leadership must also always remain impartial in the presidential nominating process, something which did not occur in the 2016 race."
And it’s that statement, folks, along with the defection of Brianna Joy Taylor to the Jill Stein campaign, and post general election loss criticism of Hillary’s campaign and the DNC corruption by progressive media spawned the narrative discussed in this Dig, so lets take a look at a screen share of an argument from one of the most outspoken Centrists on Twitter.
Ok so, first, why did Trump beat Hillary? Well, theres like 50 reasons, one was Trump got an extraordinary amount of coverage from the GOP primary all the way thru to the general. On MSNBC he had about 80% of the total coverage between the 19 main candidates (17 GOP and 2 Dem). 2016 was also the first election since the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013. New voting restrictions had the effect of driving down turnout among groups that tend to vote Democrat.
He also gained the support of evangelicals, oddly enough, due to a handful of prosperity gospel celebrities and so called prophets such as Hank Kunneman and Katt Kerr promoting Trump to the church as Cyrus 2.0, basically the Trump is an imperfect vessel being used by God that will turn America back into the Christian Nation it was intended to be, at least according to those lunatics.
I don’t recall seeing that in the Twitter influencer’s messages. Oh well. Back to reality.
Critics say Hillary didn’t campaign enough Michigan and Wisconsin, by her own admission in her book “What Happened” she was caught by surprise by Wisconsin.
The former secretary of state wrote that her team had more staffers on the ground than Obama did in 2012 and spent 211% more on TV ads in Pennsylvania and 167% more on TV than in Michigan than Obama had. All this of course as people were cutting the cord, but no way that that is important, eh?
HRC spent more than Obama had, but those ads were ineffective. They focused on Trump, not on the issues, not her sluggish “likability” numbers, and were sorely ineffective online, as we will see soon.
Hillary was also hurt badly by the re-opening of the investigation into her emails by James Comey in October, she was victim of a social media voter suppression campaign, led mostly by Russian bots, which according to the Washington Post effectively kept 4 million Obama 2012 voters, mostly white women and blacks, from going to the polls. We know that the black vote was targeted by suppression efforts from Russian trolls (as made clear in ads released by social media companies, and reports by Bloomberg News and the Trump campaign itself.
Clinton’s “1996 suggestion ‘super predators’ statement was the basis of the effort to discourage black voters.
Then there was Trump’s 95 million investment in Brad Parscale as digital media campaign manager. Parscale used social media advertisements with a marketing strategy of different face expressions, font colors and slogans like "Basket of Deplorables, a HRC quote.
After Parscale realized Virginia and Ohio were unable to be swayed, he re-allocated campaign resources to Michigan and Wisconsin.
Parscale enlisted Cambridge Analytica and used employees from Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other platforms for the campaign advertisements and directed his staff to navigate the platforms so that they would become proficient in utilizing their capabilities. He was especially successful in utilizing Facebook to target voters in swing states. Parscale said: "I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win. Twitter is how he talked to the people. Facebook was how he won.” According to Pew Research, In January 2016, 44% of U.S. adults reported having learned about the 2016 presidential election via from social media.
Trump initially self funded his campaign, but once that narrative had stuck, Parscale set up a major campaign on Facebook that brought in funding quickly from across the U.S. with assistance from the social media companies. He said that because the Trump campaign wanted to spend $100 million on social media, social media companies jockeyed to assist the campaign in using that money effectively, hoping for a larger share.[33] The Washington Post wrote, in light of Trump's narrow margins of victory, Parscale could "justifiably take credit". Again citing Pew, While the candidates’ level of posting was about the same, public response was not. In every measurable category of user attention the public responded to Donald Trump’s social media updates more frequently than to other candidates’ posts. Trump’s posts on Twitter, for example, were retweeted almost 6,000 times on average compared with just over 1,500 for Clinton and almost 2,500 for Sanders. And remember, this triggers algorithms that bring more clicks later.
But still, there is the fact that a percentage of Bernie Voters did vote for Trump. So, lets discuss that one and find out why.
Now, the narrative, clearly, is that it’s progressives who supported Bernie defected at between 15-25% and voted for Trump or Jill Stein over Clinton. The narrative claims that these were depended on Democratic voters whom would otherwise have voted HRC had they not been such big whiny misogynist and racist babies.
So I’d like you to meet one guy who was a Bernie Bro in 2016 who did not vote for Hillary. This guy. I voted for Gary Johnson. So, the narrative must then be true, right? Well, no. Because in 2015 I was a Republican. There was no chance I was going to vote for Trump, but there was also never a chance that I was going to vote for Hillary. I was a Republican, but I liked Bernie. And I was not alone.
So, before I get into the brass tax here, lets look at another time people shifted parties due to populist efforts, the Regan Republican.
During the 1980 election voters were disillusioned with the economic of the late 70s and Jimmy Carter’s struggles, and thus supported California governor and former Democrat Ronald Reagan. Reagan's populist, optimistic tone won over traditional Democrat voters to an almost unprecedented degree.
Stan Greenberg issued a study of Reagan Democrats, analyzing white union auto workers who no longer saw the Democratic party as champions of their working class aspirations, but instead saw them as working primarily for the benefit of the poor people, feminists, and minority groups. They also supported Reagan's strong stance on national security and opposed taxes. Back to this in a sec…
Bernie–Trump voters, voted for Bernie in 2016 primaries but voted for Trump in the general. According to Cooperative Congressional Election Study these voters comprised an estimated 12% of Sanders supporters. Another 12% of his supporters voted Third Party.
So, it’s likely true that if all Sanders supporters had voted for Clinton then she would have won (though to be fair, nobody in that camp likes to talk about what the percentage of hypothetical Hillary Trump voters would have been if Sanders had won the nomination.). So, then, Dutch, the Blue Dogs are correct, right? Bernie is a progressive, so anyone voting for Bernie must be a progressive, so it’s progressives fault. Dutch, you idiot.
Not so fast.
Remember Greenberg, who studied the Regan Democrat white union workers? Greenberg periodically revisited these voters. This same group said they were comfortable with Bill Clinton because he was fiscally conservative and tough on crime, as Bill called himself “A different kind of Democrat and aligned himself with Third Way policies (Third Way by the way is akin to centrism. It marries centre-right economics with centre-left social policies. Many of them grew 'comfortable' with Obama because he had "become normal and uninteresting". Greenberg also pointed out the groups growing “middle-class anger and frustrations about race and Democratic politicians". Not shockingly, the study found these voters voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and again in 2020. I’m sorry but do these sound like progressives?
Obama–Trump voters, are people who voted for Obama in 2008 and then Trump, and is a group that aligns somewhat with Reagan Dems, according to Reagan biographer Craig Shirley. Data shows that in 2016, these voters comprised roughly 13% of Trump voters, almost exclusively white males, many of whom already had defected and voted for Romney in 2012. Don’t forget to stop me when these groups sound like progressives.
Fact is, the Reagan Democrat was drawn to the message of the Sanders campaign, and were likely never in the reach of Hillary.
Compared to other Sanders voters, these Regan Democrat adjacent Sanders–Trump voters are less likely to identify as Democrats and have more conservative views on social and racial issues. They tend to be older and are more likely to be white than the bulk of Bernie’s supporters, which was a very young and diverse bloc.
According to 2017 research conducted by UMass, Sanders-Trump voters were much less likely to identify as Democrats than Sanders voters who voted for Clinton or a third-party candidate, with about half of the voting bloc identified as Republicans or conservative leaning independents.[4]
Over 40% of Sanders-Trump voters disagreed that white people have advantages, compared to less than 10% of Sanders voters who voted for Clinton. The CCES survey showed that only between 17% and 18% of Sanders-Trump voters identified themselves as ideologically liberal, with the rest either identifying as moderate or conservative. (62% of Sanders voters who voted 3rd party identified as somewhat liberal.) Again please let me know when I start describing your typical progressive voter.
Data from a VOTER survey showed that Bernie-Trump voters rated minority groups less favorably than Sanders-Clinton voters; this included Latinos, Muslims and LGBT people. The same survey also showed that only 35% of Sanders-Trump voters had voted for Obama, in contrast, 95% of Sanders-Clinton voters voted for Obama, and that latter group, turns out includes progressives. The Blue Dogs make the mistake of confusing unenthusiastic about Hillary with a propensity to not vote for her at all.
That is Wrong.
It's true Bernie’s populist message focused on a plan for America, not specifically a plan for certain groups. While it’s fair to criticize that, it worked for drawing in those working class, older, white, more socially conservative voters. But Blue Dogs seem to think Bernie should have refused the support of that bloc. Maybe, but the silence on the same group that supported Bill, is, well, loud.
Overall, as many as 22% of Sanders supporters were or aligned closely in political views to Reagan Democrats. Political scientist John M. Sides agrees that this group was “unlikely to be inclined to support Clinton in the first place.[1]” Tim Chapman, of the conservative advocacy group Heritage Action, suggested that both Trump and Sanders had strong populist appeal, especially to working-class voters, despite their starkly different policies, and that Sanders' early appeal to later Trump voters in 2016 was due to his outsider status, his populist policies, and his targeting of issues which affected groups of people Trump attempted to court in his 2016 campaign.
This block of voters is out there, and they don’t have a real home. Because they were drawn to Bernie, who for a time was seen as having a better shot than Trump did against Ted Cruz, was not at all unprecedented.
Moreover, defections from a primary to general election are common. More voters went from Hillary Clinton to John McCain in 2008 than went from Sanders to Trump in 2016, according to a 2017 article in Vox based on research conducted by UMass.
Last, exactly zero of the independent progressive media outlets that supported Bernie in the primary endorsed anyone other than Hillary Clinton. Progressives are not socially conservative. Every single LGBT candidate is a progressive. Pointing out that Bernie has real problems when it comes to his reach into communities of color is fair criticism. But this is a criticism of Bernie, not of the progressive wing, as is evidenced by the demographics of progressive candidates, which are nearly 70% people of color or LGBT, compared to 35% of non-progressives who are people of color with zero LGBT I could find.
2016 was an election cycle in which Trump’s margin of victory was one of the narrowest in U.S. history. It came down to about 78,000 votes in three states. While there is substantial evidence that specific blocks of Bernie Supporters voted for Trump or others in 2016, there is no evidence, and further no logical line of thinking, that people who identified as progressives in 2016 voted for anyone other than Hillary in significant numbers or that the Bernie primary voter was the only factor. It should also be noted that 86% of eligible Progressive Left voted in the election, a % rivaled only by so called Faith and Flag Conservatives. This is compared to 68% of Blue Dog or moderate Democrats, so even if some of those progressives defected, the number is dwarfed by the 32% of Blue Dogs that stayed home willingly, (or, to be fair, were suppressed). 32% of a far larger amount of moderate Democrats than there are progressives is of huge significance in this complex equation.
So stop blaming progressives for 2016. Your story and your stats just don’t line up with reality. Stop picking fights. Youre such a big proponent of reaching across the aisle, reach within it, and stop being so toxic. We are on your team.
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Jill Stein got 1.04% of the vote in Wisconsin, a state both Clinton and Trump needed to win. In PA, stein increased her 2012 tally from 21,000 to 49,000, an increase of 28,000 votes, and Bernie got 6000 write ins, so 34k, but Trump won by 45k. That scenario is possible in Michigan, but that would be assuming a lot.
Trump won 12 of 18 congressional districts, including one that elected a democrat to congress. Progressives would not vote downballot republican.
Third party votes were up across the country, evan mcmullin got 800,000 and was not even on the ballot.