More Clinton supporters voted for McCain than Bernie supporters voted for Trump

[Arbitrage1980]

This talking point is extremely misleading.  I ask you to read this post with an open mind.  If you want to dispute, please try arguing the bolded facts, not just posting "lol MacArthur triggered" like a 12-year-old.

The line is "25% of Hillary supporters voted for McCain, only 12% of Bernie supporters voted for Trump."  Not only do you see this all over social media, it's also one of the #1 talking points Sanders surrogates use in media appearances.  And you're going to start seeing it far more often once Bernie's anti-party scorched-earth tactics, factionalism, and the 2016 mess become campaign issues, which appears to be Warren's strategy.

Let's start with the 25% number.  There is one single source for this, which is a "Public Opinion Quarterly" poll (anyone ever heard of them?  lol).  It says that of Clinton voters, 70% of them voted Obama, 25% McCain, 5% didn't vote.

This isn't actually a poll, though.  It's an unweighted dump of survey results.  As we know here on Atlas, just reporting raw numbers isn't a poll; pollsters use stratification and demographic weighting to get actual predictive results.  And that's why we see a whole bunch of issues.  First and foremost, it also says only 87% of Obama voters voted for him in the general.  Second, doing the math on the results in the poll, it says McCain received 1% more than Obama (8% away from the actual results).

So, I think we can all agree that this number is baloney.  The actual results, according to exit polling, were that 84% of Hillary voters went for Obama, and 15% for McCain, 1% Other/NV.

Fact 1:  84% of Clinton voters went for Obama.  The "25% voted McCain" number is from an unscientific survey, not an actual poll.

Now let's look at that 12% number.  That's coming from a FiveThirtyEight report.  But when we look at this table, we see that yes, it's true 12% of Bernie supporters voted for Trump; however, 4.5% voted for Jill Stein, 3.2% voted for Gary Johnson, and 6% were Other/NV.  In total, 25.7% didn't vote for Hillary.

And this makes sense when you think back to 2016.  Yes, there were plenty of former Bernie "supporters" urging them to vote for Trump.  But the real effort was to encourage them to vote third-party or stay home.  A lot of people currently in senior positions in Bernie's inner circle (including all three black people he campaigns with - Nina Turner, Killer Mike, and Cornel West) supported Jill Stein and urged former Sanders supporters to vote for her over Clinton.  Sanders' own wife was out there telling folks to "vote your conscience" the day before the election.  The online left-wing media, which gets its cues directly from the Sanders campaign, was divided between "anyone but Clinton" and "I hate her with all my heart but I'll vote for her if I absolutely have to."  Is it any surprise that more than 13% of Bernie supporters ultimately voted third-party or stayed home?

Fact 2:  74.3% of Sanders supporters voted for Clinton.  12% voted for Trump, but a further 14% voted third-party or stayed home.

So 84% of Clinton voters went to Obama, while 74% of Sanders supporters voted for Clinton.  Sanders got 40% of Democratic primary voters, so let's say those were 20% of the country.  That means that a full 5% of the electorate were Sanders voters who could have voted Clinton but instead voted Trump, Stein, Johnson, Harambe, or Netflix.  And there was a 10% difference between 2016 and 2008, which means that the #NeverHillary impact in 2016 was a full 2% more of the electorate.  Add 2% to Clinton's results and she wins Florida (lost by 1.2%), Pennsylvania (lost by 0.72%), Michigan (lost by 0.23%), and Wisconsin (lost by 0.77%).  In PA/MI/WI, Stein voters alone outnumbered the Clinton-Trump margin.

Fact 3:  If Clinton had received 84% of Sanders supporters instead of 74%, she would have won the election.

Now is this the only reason Clinton lost?  Is Sanders solely responsible for the Clinton loss?  Of course not.  In a campaign that ultimately comes down to 0.7% of the vote in three states, it took a confluence of several different factors to take Clinton down.  If Comey hadn't dropped his phony "reopening" of the Clinton investigation over nothing a week before the election, she would have won.  If the Clinton campaign had focused 100% of their resources in October on solidifying the swing states, instead of getting overconfident and trying to spread themselves thin to help downballot candidates, they would have won.

But the evidence is pretty much incontrovertible that if Sanders had done for Clinton what she did for Obama in 2008, a full-throated endorsement and diligent, devoted effort to defeat Trump, she would have won.  Instead, we got a half-baked "Clinton is bad but she's not as bad as Trump" endorsement, a self-centered book tour disguised as campaigning that barely mentioned Clinton, his former campaign staff absconding to the Green Party, and his former media empire turning extremely anti-Clinton, none of which Bernie did anything to stop.

Bernie has spent most of 2018-19 trying to gaslight voters into thinking he did everything he could to help Clinton and the Democrats in 2016.  But I was intimately involved in the Clinton campaign in 2016 and I remember being horrified at what Sanders was doing.  It was a series of "Oh God, he's really going to do this to us" moments.

After running a scorched-earth campaign where he was still attacking the nominee in June/July and creating mayhem at the convention and endorsing the WikiLeaks attack as an avenue towards blackmailing the Democratic Party, Sanders gave a begrudging speech where the only nice things he could say about Clinton were "she agrees with me on some issues", disappeared for several months to write a book about how great his campaign was, demanded a private plane and all sorts of concessions from Clinton just to campaign for her, and then his campaign events were the same begrudging speech and self-aggrandizement.  He barely mentioned Clinton during those events, just saying "anyone but Trump", which left the door open to 14% of his supporters voting for someone who was neither Trump nor Clinton.

Fact 4:  Bernie may not be fully responsible for the gap, but he did far less to help Clinton in 2016 than Clinton did to help Obama in 2008.

Really sorry for your loss and the fact that Donald J. Trump is YOUR President.