Bernie Sanders Voters Helped Trump Win and Here's Proof

[CentralMass]

115. Relative to recent elections, your conclusion is flawed

From the Washington post.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/24/did-enough-bernie-sanders-supporters-vote-for-trump-to-cost-clinton-the-election/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.449561578e14
Executive summary:
Two surveys estimate that 12 percent of Sanders voters voted for Trump. A third survey suggests it was 6 percent.

However in 2008 24 percent of people who supported Clinton in the primary as of March 2008 then reported voting for McCain in the general election. So by a 2 to 1 margin, Hillary voters in 2008 voted for McCain versus the number Sanders voters who voted for trump in 2016.

The other conclusion from this study was that the Sanders Trump voters were not Democrats.

Some related quotes from the article below.


"Two surveys estimate that 12 percent of Sanders voters voted for Trump. A third survey suggests it was 6 percent.

Another useful comparison is to 2008, when the question was whether Clinton supporters would vote for Barack Obama or John McCain (R-Ariz.) Based on data from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, a YouGov survey that also interviewed respondents multiple times during the campaign, 24 percent of people who supported Clinton in the primary as of March 2008 then reported voting for McCain in the general election.


Thus, the 6 percent or 12 percent of Sanders supporters who may have supported Trump does not look especially large in comparison with these other examples."


What kinds of Sanders voters supported Trump?

Perhaps the most important feature of Sanders-Trump voters is this: They weren’t really Democrats to begin with.

Of course, we know that many Sanders voters did not readily identify with the Democratic Party as of 2016, and Schaffner found that Sanders-Trump voters were even less likely to identify as Democrats. Sanders-Trump voters didn’t much approve of Obama either.

In fact, this was true well before 2016. In the VOTER Survey, we know how Sanders-Trump voters voted in 2012, based on an earlier interview in November 2012. Only 35 percent of them reported voting for Obama, compared with 95 percent of Sanders-Clinton voters. In other words, Sanders-Trump voters were predisposed to support Republicans in presidential general elections well before Trump’s candidacy."

"In short, it may be hard to know exactly how many Sanders-Trump voters there were, or whether they really cost Clinton the election. But it doesn’t appear that many of them were predisposed to support Clinton in the first place."