Is there any silver lining for progressives?

[JudyM]

207. According to this, Hillary's primary voters had more than TWICE the defection rate to McCain

as Sanders’ voters did!

While much was made of the so-called Bernie-or-bust phenomenon, the number of Sanders supporters who crossed party lines to vote for Trump in 2016 may not be that unusual. A 2010 study in Public Opinion Quarterly found that in the 2008 election 25 percent of those who voted for Clinton in the Democratic primary ended up voting for Republican John McCain, rather than Barack Obama, in the general election.

And here’s the kicker: Hillary’s primary voters were certainly not as independent-leaning as Bernie’s.

In the many states with closed primaries, voters would have had to register as Democrats in order to vote for Sanders. So the Newsweek author’s use of “registered Democrats” as the basis of his crossover analysis is fundamentally flawed. Not to mention that part of his analysis, which was done after people apparently called out his failure to show republicans/independents in the voter pool, only had n= 4,226. I’ll have to leave it to statisticians to address that but it looks problematic to me since over 13 million people voted for him.

If they were independents who liked his populism, like, perhaps they would’ve otherwise gone for Rand Paul, then trump’s (faux) populism was closer to what they were interested in than Hillary’s platform. Where is the evidence that their votes/non-votes were caused by Bernie, himself, rather than the voters’ own political preferences?

An excerpt from your NPR report:

But then, it's not as simple as that. First off, this counterfactual world in which these voters didn't vote for Trump rests on a few ifs. If the Sanders-Trump voters in these three states had defected and if nothing else had happened to somehow take electoral votes from Clinton elsewhere and if this survey is correct ... then yes, Clinton would have won. (Some would also argue that if Clinton had campaigned more in the so-called "blue wall" states, she also could have picked up more votes.)

Bottom line: Hillary primary voters in ‘08 had double the defections to McCain as Sanders’ did to trump. Moreover, this is one person’s study, it is flawed and doesn’t even show in the least that Bernie’s actions were the cause of the defections. I realize that’s a popular belief, but these articles you offered actually prove quite the contrary.

Moreover, as I pointed out in my prior response, she got the smallest number of black voters since 2000. You didn’t explain how that isn’t something that makes you pause from blaming her loss on Sanders, the guy who held far more rallies to support her than she did for Obama.

Your Bernie-shaming doesn’t add up.

ETA: I just saw this post... note that it appears, at least in VA, that based on the demographics of how he fared against Biden, it seems that a sizable share of Sanders’ original supporters were largely voting against Hillary (now they voted for Joe), and that was well before the issues that came up months later. And guess what? Looks like it was about 12%!