Could the Sandernistas hand Donald Trump the White House?

[Adam Griffin]

Math and precedent suggest it's unlikely.

Sanders will in all likelihood end up with about 12,000,000 votes. Currently, one-quarter of his supporters say that won't vote for Hillary; 3,000,000 votes. Relatively few of those votes are those who would proactively vote for Trump (those that do are worth twice as much as those voting for third-party; -1 from Democrats & +1 to Republicans); let's say 10%.

That brings us to 3,300,000, which is the margin that Clinton would need to be above nationally (and proportionally in each relevant state) in order to win. Except...at this time in 2008, half of Clinton supporters said that they wouldn't vote for Obama. At least three-quarters of the camp "came home" by the time everything was said and done. Some people will say "this time is different" but...everybody always feels like they're living in unique times.

That leaves us with 825,000 potential spoiler votes. That's 1/4 the margin in 2004 and quite close to the margin in 2000. The fact is that if it comes down to this small of a margin and the relevant state margins are proportional to that figure, then we've probably already lost anyway given the amount of GOP electoral power and voting shenanigans/disenfranchisement that now exist in the swing states (aka every swing state).

On the other hand, there have been plenty of computer simulations ran recently that suggest the Democrats have roughly 10x the likelihood of winning the Electoral College with a tied national PV or worse than the Republicans do, so it might not even matter in such a close contest. It all depends on specific state outcomes.