What was Hillary’s best performance this year? Iowa. Does the Democratic primary have a stable progression? Yes. Would Obama have won Michigan had he and Hillary both been contesting it in a normal primary? Yes.
So, this is going to be a very short summary (since it’s 10:30 pm in Japan and I’ve got to get up early tomorrow). The Democratic primary has baffled me at times, Michigan in particular threw me for such a loop that I went against my cut and gave Sanders substantial leads in Missouri and made Ohio a nailbaiter in my predictions, despite my feelings that Missouri would be very close, and Ohio should produce a 12 point or so Hillary win. Basically, how do you explain the results so far?
Well, the easiest way to present is as a checklist.
1. Check nonwhite voting percentage.
2. Check region.
3. Check who won the state in 2008.
4. How much of the Democratic primary is conserva-dems voting against the establishment?
5. How urban is the state?
So why is Iowa Clinton’s best performance after Sanders surged to a virtual tie? Because she improved her 2008 finish by 19 points in what, by all demographic models, should be one of Sanders best states.
The divergence between Michigan and Ohio is why I think Obama would have scored an easy win had he actually been contesting Michigan.
#4 Might be odd, but its easily observed that Sanders throughout the primary, is doing well in areas with the most conservative, anti-Obama Democrats who are voting for the anti-establishment candidate, not because they remotely endorse any of Sanders views (and this was on display again last night in Florida as Sanders won just a scattering of rural hard-core conservative Dixiecrat counties, including a county called, Dixie). It helps explain Oklahoma (aside from how white the state is), for instance, where Democrats were blocked from voting in the Republican primary, and Sanders won Democrats who identified as conservative by a 2:1 margin. And why Sanders is up huge in West Virginia, a state Clinton won massive in 2008 but which is furious over coal and the EPA and Obama and views Clinton as a proxy for those furies. A running theme in this primary is that counter to initial expectations, Sanders is getting consistent support from conservative anti-establishment Democrats who do not support or even know his platform and probably wouldn’t vote for him in the general. Clinton is not doing very well with “very conservative” democrats, and outside the south, she also seems to be doing very poor with “conservative Democrats.”
Apply these factors to Illinois and Ohio.
1. Clinton took just 32% there in 2008, even with Obama’s favored son status taken into account, it was a crushing defeat. — Won Ohio by 10 points
2. Illinois more favorable demographics and more urban/wealthy suburban.
I began to see a pattern, in that where Hillary struggles to really outpace Bernie are non-southern states with large populations of white liberals and which voted for Obama in 2008.
So I had like another page or two written with a bunch of quick stats I had to look up comparing 2008 to 2016, but the ubiquitous white space literally everywhere on the DailyKos format, which also includes no text borders, led to a situation where I accidentally clicked outside the border, then backspaced and accidentally went back a page by pressing enter, being caught up in my typing. I was surprised to learn DailyKos no longer does the auto-save of drafts, but needless to say, I lost a substantial chunk of what I’d written, at an already late hour, so I’m abbreviating the diary further and saving what I had written to be expanded for a larger diary when I regain my patience.
So yeah, basically, this is the gist. Look at who won the state in 2008. Then look at how white the state is and how rural it is. Then check and see if its in a region that favors one candidate (New England for Sanders, South for Clinton). That means for instance, that my model suggests Clinton is more favored in Arizona than Michigan. Arizona has very favorable demographics for her, high nonwhite population, heavily urban, and it voted for her by 8 points in 2008, and basically, Sanders hasn’t knocked Hillary down from 2008 unless its a heavily white and/or rural state and even then he’s not always done better than Obama, as Hillary’s substantial improvements in Kansas and Nebraska can attest.
Of states after that, well, Pennsylvania and New York are two huge delegate prizes that both have closed primaries, which is what destroyed any chance Sanders had of dampening Hillary’s margin in Florida. Even in Michigan, Sanders lost Democrats 57-43; he won there and has kept other states close, by driving turnout from third party registrants and independents and winning them huge. In Pennsylvania and New York party rules dictate that only registered Democrats can vote in a primary, which means Sanders strongest voting block won’t be able to vote for him, a block he took nearly 70% of the vote of in both Illinois and Michigan. On top of that, Hillary won both states in 2008 comfortably, and they have favorable demographics in the primary diversity and how urban concentrated the vote is.
Then take California, a state that Clinton won by 8 even with Obama winning the black vote huge. Other states that Obama won but which favor Clinton this year because of demographics are Maryland and Delaware, and Washington D.C. If you add in Puerto Rico, which has 60 delegates, those 4 states have 196 delegates, and Clinton took around 70% of the Puerto Rican vote in Florida yesterday, and took 68% there in 2008. So that being said, of the remaining states up, Hillary won the following in 2008: Indiana (2%), New York(16%), Pennsylvania (9%), New Jersey (7%), Rhode Island (18%), South Dakota (10%),California (8%), New Mexico (1%), Kentucky (36%), West Virginia (42%), and Arizona (8%). Plus Puerto Rico (38%).
She lost, North Dakota, Montana, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Connecticut, Wyoming, Wisconsin, D.C., Maryland, and Delaware. Nearly half of those states are rural western states with very few delegates between them and D.C., Maryland and Delaware strongly favor Clinton demographically. So basically, my model suggests that the remaining territory isn’t particularly favorable to Sanders.
Outside of New England, he’s only reduced Hillary’s margin (I think she improved what her actual margin would have been in a contested Michigan primary) ambiguously in Arkansas and Oklahoma, that’s it, and by -4 in the former and -13.5 in the latter, and both being heavily white, rural states with large populations of angry conservative registered Democrats who couldn’t vote in the Republican primary. To put states like Arizona and California into play, Sanders would have to prove he can shrink Hillary’s margins in diverse urban states she won in 2008.
So far, my model explains the race pretty well. It’s consistent with Hillary reforming the Obama coalition into a truly diverse coalition of black and Hispanic voters, joined by women over 40 and a chunk of the blue collar white vote that remains in the Clinton camp. It also makes certain projections that I would like to see tested through April 26, namely that many of the remaining states that Clinton won in 2008, will be far steeper hauls for Sanders than Michigan, meaning my model doesn’t suggest there is a path to making up the huge delegate lead Clinton has amassed. In 2008, momentum mattered little, polls gyrated sometimes, candidates played hard in different states, but in the end, each state came down to its fundamentals, according to which, the race was remarkable and unerringly stable beneath all the media hype and breathless partisan battles of each camp online.
I’ll get more into all this in the next post. The next one will be more about comparing 2008 to 2016, what’s changed, and relating these comparisons to my model, and then specifically making some projections for future states based on that model, actually used (2008 vote %, % urban, %nonwhite), it’ll be a more thorough post showing this model in action with examples.