Bernie Sanders had a great week. He won big in five Western caucuses: Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Utah and Hawaii. It was enough to whittle Hillary Clinton’s pledged-delegate lead to around 230, despite her own solid win in Arizona.
To get to a majority, not counting superdelegates, Mr. Sanders now needs more than 56 percent of the remaining pledged delegates.
It might not look too daunting after he just won at least 70 percent of the vote in five states. But the remaining states aren’t especially welcoming for him. Mrs. Clinton’s delegate advantage seems likelier to grow over the rest of the contests than to shrink. The remaining states force Mr. Sanders to confront his big weaknesses: affluence, diversity, establishment-friendly areas and closed primary contests.
To get a sense of how the rest of the Democratic race plays out, consider how the remaining states might vote if they follow the same demographic patterns of the first half of the primary season. The patterns include the results for all of the states where The Associated Press has reported the results by county.
Our model estimates that Mrs. Clinton would win around 54 percent of the remaining delegates, not including nonstate contests like Puerto Rico. She loses in a bunch of predominantly white, working-class states where Mr. Sanders is hoping to fare well: Wisconsin, Wyoming, North Dakota, Kentucky, Oregon, Indiana and West Virginia. But she holds on in the affluent and diverse states along the coasts. Mr. Sanders will need to win these states — and probably by a comfortable margin — to overtake her delegate lead.
It’s important to note that this type of a model is not a prediction. It merely supposes that the rest of the campaign follows the same demographic patterns of the first half. And sometimes voters go another way. The model put Mrs. Clinton on track for a big win in Michigan, which she ultimately lost. After Michigan, the same approach predicted a close race in demographically similar Ohio, where she got a big win.
Just this last week, Mr. Sanders beat the expectations of this model in all five caucus states (but underperformed by more in Arizona). There’s no reason he can’t do it again. But this approach does give a broad sense of what’s left, and it doesn’t suggest a great opportunity for Mr. Sanders.
Closed PrimariesMrs. Clinton has fared much worse in caucuses and open contests — those that allow voters who aren’t registered as Democrats — than she has in primaries or closed contests.
So far, she has done about nine percentage points better in primaries than in caucuses, and three points better in closed contests than in open ones.
The five big wins for Mr. Sanders all came in open caucuses.There’s only one open caucus left, North Dakota, and one closed caucus, Wyoming.
Mr. Sanders, conversely, has fared worse in closed primaries, like Arizona and Florida. These primaries tend to exclude the independent-leaning voters who most often support Mr. Sanders. Registered Democrats also tend to be older; the young, especially young whites, are most likely to register as independents.
There are a lot of closed contests left, including New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, New Mexico, Delaware, Kentucky and Oregon. Mr. Sanders has not yet won a closed primary.
Mr. Sanders will have the benefit of open or semi-open primaries in just California, Montana, Wisconsin, Indiana and West Virginia.
AffluenceMrs. Clinton tends to do best in affluent areas. It was even true in Mr. Sanders’s big wins this last week — she fared better in places like Seattle’s King County and Park City’s Summit County in Utah.
The model estimates that Mrs. Clinton would fare 27 points better in a county where 100 percent of households made more than $100,000 a year than she would in a demographically similar county where no households were so well off. She also does better in places where the finance industry is strong.
That’s good news for her in the Bay Area and the Northeastern corridor — two of the most affluent regions of the country. There has already been a sneak preview of her strength there: She won decisively in Northern Virginia and the Boston metropolitan area.
The remaining states force Bernie Sanders to confront his big weaknesses: affluence, diversity, establishment-friendly areas and closed primary contests. Credit Kim Raff for The New York Times
Diversity
Mrs. Clinton fares best in areas with large numbers of Hispanic or black voters. She does better among these voters in the South than in the North, but it’s nonetheless an advantage for her in California and along the Acela Corridor, where there is an above-average percentage of nonwhite voters.
The model picks up on Mrs. Clinton’s strength among nonwhite voters in a few ways, but the bottom line is that she has won every primary where white voters represent a below-average share of the electorate. She has won all but one county where nonwhite voters represented a majority of eligible voters in a primary — as is now the case in California as a whole.
Her big win in Arizona might be particularly indicative of her likely strength in Southern California and the state’s Central Valley.
Establishment PoliticsMr. Sanders has fared best in areas known for supporting anti-establishment politics — going all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt, Robert La Follette and Henry Wallace.
This model uses the last three major third-party candidates as a proxy for anti-establishment sentiment: John Anderson in 1980, Ross Perot in 1992 and Ralph Nader in 2000. It has another variable for the “Nader Democrats” — the share of Nader voters in 2000 as a percentage of the total of Al Gore and Nader voters.
These are very powerful predictors of Mr. Sanders’s strength. Alaska, for instance, has the highest number of Nader Democrats and was the best state for Mr. Sanders outside his home state, Vermont.
It bodes well for Mr. Sanders in Oregon, Montana and Wisconsin. But it won’t go very far for him in California or the Northeast.
The Anti-Obama VoteOne thing Mr. Sanders has going for him are the anti-Obama Democrats.
Mr. Sanders has generally fared poorly in the South and Appalachia, but he has tended to do better in a surprising spot: areas where there are large numbers of the old registered Democrats who vote Republican in presidential elections, but nonetheless find themselves trapped in a Democratic primary thanks to a closed or semi-closed system.
These conservative voters appear to be choosing Mr. Sanders in big numbers. You can see the traces of it in the stark increase in Mr. Sanders’s support when you cross from Georgia into the Florida Panhandle, a state with a closed primary and party registration. You can see it along the borders of Oklahoma, and along the North Carolina border as well. It shows up in another way: the large numbers of voters who are voting for “uncommitted” or a minor candidate.
It’s not entirely clear whether these voters actually support Mr. Sanders. The exit polls in Oklahoma showed Mr. Sanders winning big — 59 percent to 24 percent — among the large number (28 percent) of voters who wanted the next president to change to less liberal policies. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t support Mr. Sanders; perhaps they think of liberalism in cultural terms, like racial issues or guns. But it does raise doubts. Mr. Sanders won easily among the 17 percent of voters who trusted neither candidate in an international crisis.
The model accounts for this with a surprising variable: Barack Obama’s share of the vote in the 2012 Democratic primary. That’s not a typo. As president and running without a major opponent, Mr. Obama won just 57 percent of the vote in Oklahoma in 2012, thanks to these conservatives who still vote in Democratic primaries.
The pattern is good news for Mr. Sanders in West Virginia and Kentucky, with the model putting him over the top there, even though Mr. Sanders has lost almost all of the counties bordering these two states. Without this variable, Mrs. Clinton would be favored in both states.
Adding It UpMr. Sanders has the potential to win several states with more than 56 percent of the vote, like North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana — and even Oregon, South Dakota and Wisconsin. But these states are worth just 13 percent of the remaining delegates.
Mrs. Clinton could easily win many of the contests along the more diverse and affluent East Coast in primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and the District of Columbia.
Even if Mrs. Clinton doesn’t fare as well as the projections suggest, Mr. Sanders is very unlikely to win by a double-digit margin. He will have to make up for those delegates elsewhere.
Mr. Sanders has better opportunities to win in California, Indiana, Kentucky, New Mexico and Rhode Island. But he is not a clear favorite in these states, and may be considered an underdog in the biggest prize: California.
But Mr. Sanders needs more than merely a win in California. He needs to win there by at least 20 percentage points, considering that he is unlikely to win at least 56 percent of the vote along the Acela Corridor.
So far, Mr. Sanders has won only two of the 21 primaries by more than 16 points: Vermont, his home state, and neighboring New Hampshire.
Source
EPT
