Tuesday, February 25, 2020

David Broockman & Joshua Kalla: ‘Bernie Sanders looks electable in surveys — but it could be a mirage’


From Vox:

We found that nominating Sanders would drive many Americans — who would otherwise vote for a moderate Democrat — to vote for Trump, especially otherwise Trump-skeptical Republicans. 

Republicans are more likely to say they would vote for Trump if Sanders is nominated: Approximately 2 percent of Republicans choose Trump over Sanders, but desert Trump when we pit him against a more moderate Democrat like Buttigieg, Biden, or Bloomberg....

But for Sanders to do as well as a moderate Democrat against Trump in November by stimulating youth turnout, his nomination would need to boost turnout of young left-leaning voters enormously — according to our data, one in six left-leaning young people who otherwise wouldn’t vote would need to turn out because Sanders was nominated. There are good reasons to doubt that Sanders’s nomination would produce a youth turnout surge this large....

In one analysis, we disregard what voters say about whether they would vote, and use their demographics and party affiliation to infer the shape of the likely electorate....  With this approach, Sanders trails all three leading moderate candidates in head-to-head polls against Trump.


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