The polling crosstabs show that Sanders does well among (relatively) educated white liberals, with some crossover to nonwhites with college degrees. Trump is appealing to those without the degrees — your non-college white workers.

This isn’t to say that there are no non-college educated white workers who support Sanders — he has the backing of several unions. But the idea that the two groups would somehow make common cause over dissatisfaction with the status quo is farfetched to me.

Trump’s appeal is to a really nasty xenophobic streak. Those folks will not go near anyone who says they want to help people if it looks like people of color might be helped as well. This is a fundamental political reality that has existed for decades. One reason some welfare programs were attacked was precisely because they aided people of color. (Remember the “welfare queen?”)

So no, I just don’t buy the two groups coming together very much at all, except at the margins maybe.

If Sanders and Trump supporters could somehow find common cause, they would be a force to reckon with. One of my work buddies swears that there’s a stat that a lot of people are picking Trump and Sanders as their first and second choices right now. No matter what the media say about Iowa, people still want a change.

Kevin, it is not clear to me either which is the more relevant negative.

Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Hillary Clinton is a Clinton.

I’m not sure which is the larger cross to bear. Intuitively I’d say it’s the ‘socialist’ tag that Republicans will try to beat Sanders with, but given the political atmosphere it might actually be an advantage.

Similarly the name ‘Clinton’ will just cause some voters to foam at the mouth – not all of them rabid Republicans. Yet, this too could be an advantage for Hillary; the Democratic Party almost by necessity requires a large African-American turnout to win elections in toss-up states. Other than Barack Obama, can anyone generate more excitement and approval in the African-American community than Bill Clinton?

Given what’s presented on the GOP side, any Democrat that wouldn’t fully support either Bernie or Hillary in the general election is a fool.

Sanders could win the nomination, but the election? It’s possible that his candidacy could inspire many who otherwise wouldn’t vote. I don’t believe that he could inspire enough to elect a House and Senate that would support his agenda. What worries me most is the ability of the Republicans to attack Sanders as a socialist who wants to raise taxes on the middle class. To me, the combination of socialism and higher middle class taxes in an American election doesn’t look like a winner.
I hope I’m wrong.

(There’s a whole rant I could get into about the way Harvard chooses students that privileges people who are descendants of the “right” people, even decades after they dropped Jewish quotas and the like).

However, I disagree with one (not very important) point. Harvard is not as out of region as most people assume. When I worked/went to school there, I was surprised to learn what a large percentage of Harvard College students were from within 100 miles. Very large (can’t remember). Among staff, 100% local, among faculty, very very local compared to what one might think, because of the relatively concentrated and insular nature of the academic community. Harvard is like the Yankees. Every academic department in the country with more than 15 people in it has at least one Harvard PhD, but at home, not so much the reverse.

Graduate school is the reverse, of course. In my program, counting the year before, mine, and the year after, to get up a good number, I think there were exactly two of us who were local, and I was actually form NY originally.

New Hampshire and Vermont are very different, it is true — New Hampshire was in many ways more semi-industrial, for instance. That said, the demographics in New Hampshire favor Sanders, and he’s local. The similarities between New Hampshire and the towns along the North Shore and getting up into Lawrence and Lowell work for Sanders here too: a guy that does well among college students working in Boston is a pretty good bet, given that the whole city runs along the beat of the academic calendar.

Let’s leave aside the famous Harvard and MIT which have a lot of out of staters. There’s BU, BC, UMass Boston, Bowdoin, Suffolk U, Mass Art, Berklee, Northeastern, Wentworth, Emerson, Mt. Ida, and about two dozen others and that’s just in the city environs. In New Hampshire there’s Dartmouth and UNH and the latter serves largely students from the area (and from Massachusetts — we used to joke that if you wanted to go to high school again UNH was the way to do it). The areas outside of Boston are pretty college heavy too, and in many cases have some cross-over appeal to non-college educated white workers, I think, since the families that send their kids to Salem State U aren’t exactly affluent. (People who aren’t from there often don’t see the myriad small public and private schools that cater to a lot of first-generation college students).

So Sanders has a big built-in advantage in the most populous districts in Massachusetts, and a base to work from out west too. (Williams, for instance, is out in the Berkshires).

So I could see — if everything breaks right for him — Sanders making a hell of a showing in New Hampshire, Vermont (of course) and Massachusetts. I should also add Sanders would have some appeal in Connecticut and Rhode Island, though a bit less. New England doesn’t get you a ton of delegates but it was in some ways the “soul” of the Democratic party in the Northeast, punching above its weight; the party elites take what goes on there seriously enough that they might take steps if things don’t go their way. (See: 2006, and what they did to Ned Lamont).

Outside of that Sanders is going to have some problems. He hasn’t connected super well to nonwhite voters, and the behavior of a few of his supporters has been a real problem — he needs to get the campaign on message and disciplined in a way that I suspect is a bit foreign to him if for no other reason than the sheer size. My own hypothesis is that the BernieBro phenomenon comes from relatively new activists — people who aren’t and haven’t been terribly relevant to the progressive movements before but got a platform and ran with it. Unfortunately they are the ones who didn’t have a nice sit down with the adults.

There’s a whole other discussion here about the role of social media and all that. But getting back to Sanders: he needs to give nonwhites a reason to vote for him, and he hasn’t, not really. His missteps with Black Lives Matter hurt him there. And as far as I know he has done zero outreach to Latino voters.

So I see Sanders as one who will do well in states where white-er progressives dominate — Oregon, perhaps. Wisconsin. He will falter in states where they don’t (Illinois, California). The latter are where the delegates are, and we haven’t even gotten to the fact that a load of endorsements have gone to Hillary Clinton from the get-go.