If Sanders is doing this well in WV, shouldn't he be polling a bit better TN? Maybe not winning there, but at least keeping it in single digits?
Several reasons:
1. There are a lot of black people in Middle and West Tennessee, and they probably make up nearly half of the Dem primary voters there.
2. Democratic support among rural whites across the state has collapsed more thoroughly than in West Virginia. Plus, East Tennessee, the whitest part of the state, is ancestrally Republican going all the way back to the Civil War anyway.
3. Tennessee has no registration by party, so the many rural whites who've switched allegiances aren't locked into voting in the Democratic primary, and have no incentive to do so, since the presidential primary is largely the only real race on March 1, even though a few counties may have contested primaries for local offices (Again, those county primaries are more likely to be on the GOP side anyway).
As you see, these factors combine to make Tennessee's Dem primary demographics significantly less white than West Virginia's. I'd still look for Bernie to pull off wins among the few people who pull Democratic ballots in rural East Tennessee, however.
