Comments on: “Southern” Voters Prefer Clinton, Others Mixed

By: Who Won The New York Democratic Primary, and Why? – Greg Laden's Blog

Who Won The New York Democratic Primary, and Why? – Greg Laden's Blog — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 02:02:02 +0000

[…] But, is this what will happen? Clinton does better than Sanders in southern states, and New York is not a southern state. In fact, Clinton tends to win all of the southern states, and while Sanders wins more non-southern states than Clinton, he certainly does not win all of them. See this for more details on the southern effect. […]

By: Jesse

Jesse — Sun, 17 Apr 2016 22:44:53 +0000

Not to be a Debbie Downer, but the fact is Sanders is still the guy for whiter and wealthier states. While it’s true his percentage of African American voters goes up as you go north, he needs to get past the ~30 percent mark. He might do that in NY, but I don’t see a path for that elsewhere.

Now I know that minorities do vote for Sanders. So I’m not going to listen to that “you’re erasing minority voters who like him” line. There’s a difference between saying that he can get minority voters to vote for him — clearly he has some — and saying whether enough will do so to put him over the top. We can go back and forth as to why that is all day, but for now it’s an empirical fact that in more diverse states he simply hasn’t done as well as he needs to.

(Fviethirtyeight has an interesting analysis that notes Sanders isn’t doing as well in states that actually look like the Democratic electorate).

If Sanders way outperforms the polls in NY he’ll split it. But that won’t be enough. I do think it will be very interesting to see if any native son effect works for him in Brooklyn. If Clinton underperforms seriously in NY that will change the media narrative of the campaign — New Yorkers did (at a statewide level) vote her into office twice, after all.

By: chris heinz

chris heinz — Fri, 15 Apr 2016 20:33:26 +0000

Given that we see Bernie as the candidate of the Occupy movement, we tend to forget that he is Jewish. I would be surprised if good old-fashioned Southern antisemitism did not account for a significant portion of his weakness in the south.

By: RickR

RickR — Fri, 15 Apr 2016 19:52:30 +0000

And if if break out “western” voters, you will find they generally prefer Sanders.

Just as Texas is not southern, it in not western either; the saying is that the line between the south and the west runs between Dallas and Fort Worth.