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

[GeneralMacArthur]

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.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I appreciate you taking the time to lay out your thoughts General, but I'd ask that next time, please don't use "clickbait" format.  

"I think Trump SHOULD leave office"

*Click!*

"...after 2025!!!"

It just comes off as disingenuous and kind of condescending. 

I appreciate that.  In this case I wanted to explicitly repeat the talking point being addressed, but I can see where you might feel tricked.

[GeneralMacArthur]

It's still the case that more than 12% of Clinton voters voted for McCain, and while voting third party hurts the Democratic candidate, voting Republican hurts them more.

Well yeah I agree, I think it's really bad that 15% of Clinton voters went for McCain in 2008.  And I think it's not just really bad, but even worse, that 26% of Sanders voters refused to vote for Clinton in 2016.

Drawing a line between voting for Trump and voting for Jill Stein is kind of splitting hairs, especially since the entire point of the Stein campaign was to help Trump.

Also, what more could Sanders have done for Clinton? He campaign many times for her, even though he clearly wasn't offered the same olive branch that Clinton was in 2008, and often even when Sanders tried to convince his supporters to vote for Clinton, those that weren't open to the idea wouldn't have it. I highly doubt that Clinton would've gotten more support if not for Sanders; if anything, she probably would've gotten less.

Pretty similar to a post I made about a month ago where someone asked the same question for this campaign cycle, what do I want Sanders to do?

• Publicly ask his supporters to STOP, and condemn this kind of behavior when it becomes a story.  I don't care how he does it.  Pick out some particularly egregious incident and turn it into a Sister Soulja thing.
• Replace the belligerent Twitter trolls running his campaign (Sirota, Gray, Turner, etc.) with professional, respectable, well-behaved staff.  They don't have to be suits, they just have to not be assholes.
• Try to make amends with the other candidates, and the low-paid hard-working staff at the DNC, the WFP, state Democratic parties, and other liberal organizations.  It is mostly low-level people and volunteers who have to deal with abuse from his campaign and supporters.
• Stop using us-vs-them, everyone-except-me-is-corrupt language about the Democratic party.  This only encourages his supporters to see everyone else in the primary as an enemy and treat them just as badly as the Trump supporters do.
• When conspiracy theories featuring Sanders or his campaign pop up on the radar, come out publicly and put the kibosh on them.  He's become a useful idiot for the Republicans and the Russians because when they use him to concoct conspiracy theories to divide our party, he plays along.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Bernie should have dropped out after losing California in 2016 at latest and endorse Hillary. But instead he chose to stay in until the end and keep his cult alive. I'm not suggesting this would have changed the outcome (nor can I claim the opposite). The reason some Bernie supporters went to Trump is due to the fact they wanted to blow up the system. And Hillary was not offering that, despite having more policy agreements with Bernie than Bernie has with Trump.

Bernie should have dropped out when he was mathematically eliminated, which was sometime in April when he was going to need 70%+ of the remaining vote to win.  Instead he sent out a bunch of e-mails to his supporters insisting that he really was winning, but the establishment was rigging it against them by having superdelegates swing the election to Clinton.  Trump himself echoed this:

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/757191160481873920?lang=en

There were a whole set of narratives being pushed very loudly and aggressively by not just Russia and the Trump campaign but also a lot of former Sanders supporters, including former senior members of his campaign.  For example, "The DNC rigged the election to steal it from Bernie" or "Hillary Clinton is a secret conservative and her positions are all lies" or "the Democratic Party is totally corrupt and owned by billionaires and corporations" or literally anything about WikiLeaks.

Bernie was the only person who could stop these narratives, because he is the one who created them, and they were being propagated by people who had been so indoctrinated by his cult of personality that they saw him and his allies as the only trustworthy voices in the world.  And Bernie was 100% aware of these efforts; he even got in a kerfuffle a few years ago because he tried to lie that he had no idea and some documents were dumped proving that he did know.  But he didn't do anything.

If Bernie had given a speech directly addressing these narratives and shooting them down, it would have taken him all of twenty minutes, cost him very little, and made a huge difference.  Something like "Hillary Clinton won the election fair and square.  Now I know there has been some talk about superdelegates.  Let me be clear.  The superdelegates are not why Hillary won the election.  Hillary Clinton won a strong campaign, and although we fought hard, we were not able to receive as many votes as her in key battleground states."  Instead, he was still talking about how superdelegates were evidence of rigging.  I mean imagine if Bernie had replied to that Trump tweet saying it wasn't true.  He replies to Trump tweets all the time but couldn't be bothered to reply to that one.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Okay, but you specifically said that it's a "lie" that more Clinton voters went for McCain than Sanders voters that went for Trump, so you might want to modify that.

Oh that's true, good point.  I actually originally had a more convoluted, precise title to this post, and then changed it to just echo the talking point but forgot to change the first line.

I've fixed.

And sure, Sanders could condemn the behavior of his more rabid supporters more (he's done it to a greater extent this year) and hire better surrogates, but how much of this would really help Clinton/Biden?

It would help plenty.  None of this crap existed in mid-2015, when Clinton's favorables among Democrats and the general electorate were like 90%+.  Sanders was even pushing the Clinton Cash story around the time of the NY primary; that would be the Clinton Cash conspiracy that was investigated by the Trump administration and just closed last week with a "we didn't find anything" whimper.

Sanders openly accused Clinton of being 100% corrupt, bought-and-paid-for by millionaires and billionaires, someone who would change positions if her donors told her to.

Sanders made the claim that the Democratic Party was rigging the election against him via superdelegates and party machinations.  Remember when he said DWS was rigging the election in Clinton's favor by not having enough debates?  And then the DNC gave him his debate and he insisted the DNC not be involved at all, and bragged to his supporters about it.  It's not like the idea that the primary was rigged just popped up out of the blue in July 2016.  Sanders came up with it and was pushing it because it helped him.

He spent the entire campaign creating these narratives, he can't suddenly throw his hands up and say "no foul, no foul" in the general.

His us vs. them rhetoric is talking about the most powerful people in the country, not the Democratic Party specifically, and the idea that a small number of people have way too much money and power and that we need structural change to the country is the cornerstone of his campaign and exactly what many Democrats are hungry for. Backing off from that is probably the worst thing he could do.

Sure, and in fact I agree with that sentiment that Sanders expresses.  Obama used this rhetoric too, but he managed to do it without also insisting that the entire Democratic Party was corrupt, and in particular its general election candidate.  That part was a Sanders invention.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The lies are all over social media today as Bernie-or-Busters try to justify their behavior.

This thread will never stop being relevant.