Top of the pack
Bernie Sanders has won a resounding victory in Nevada – the Democratic primary is his to lose. Where previous results were far from decisive, this win is an undeniable show of strength moving forward.
With a narrow win in New Hampshire, critics were quick to point out that Sanders won the state by twenty points in the 2016 Democratic caucus. His narrow loss to Pete Buttigieg in Iowa was an upset, especially given his six point polling lead over the former South Bend Mayor and the name recognition advantage that Sanders enjoys across the country.
At the Thursday debate in Las Vegas, he suffered attacks from all other candidates about rhetoric perceived as divisive and an extreme base of support that launches online attacks against other candidates. The argument from the moderate wing of the party seems to be that Sanders does not command a sufficiently broad appeal of voters.
Buttigieg used his Nevada concession speech to put forward this argument. “Sen. Sanders believes in an inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats, not to mention most Americans” he said. Similarly, political pundits have proclaimed a “ceiling” in support for Bernie Sanders.
Breaking down Sanders’ results in Nevada paints a different picture.
Winning big, winning broad
What stands out in Sanders’ win in Nevada is not just the margin of victory. With 87% of precincts report, his margin over Biden is approaching 30 points. The size of the margin is impressive and is close to the vote share that Sanders achieved in 2016, running one on one against Hillary Clinton. More crucially, however, digging deeper into the numbers reveals that Sanders has achieved impressive breadth of support.
Nevada is one of five majority-minority states, making it far more diverse than the overwhelmingly white Iowa and New Hampshire, and closer to the Democratic party which is quickly heading in the same direction. Entrance polls showed Sanders with a crushing majority of Hispanic voters – 40 points ahead of Biden, who placed second in the demographic. Among black voters, Biden led the entrance polls with 34 points to Sanders 28.
One of the biggest criticisms levelled against Sanders when considering his breadth of appeal was reliance on young voters. Part of this argument is one of electability, given that older voters tend to turn out more reliably. This was not the case with Nevada. Sanders won in three out of four age brackets (including a 58-point blowout among voters 18-29), losing only among voters aged 65 and older.
As a self-described socialist, Sanders has embraced extremely risky political messaging for the US context. In Nevada, despite the predictions of some pundits, this did not seem to have a strong effect. Among moderate and conservative voters, Sanders was first, according both to the NBC early voter survey and the CNN entrance poll.
In some categories – namely: young, Latinx, very liberal – Sanders achieved crushing margins of victory, shocking no one. More significantly, he garnered support from groups that were projected to be outside of his “narrow” coalition. In every demographic surveyed by the exit poll, and every demographic from currently reported precincts, Sanders ranged from strong first to close second. Even the Culinary Union controversy failed to dent his chances. Sanders won 34% of caucus-goers from union households – far more than any other candidates.
Meanwhile, candidates relying on the unity counter-message were nowhere to be seen in some demographics, and far more reliant on a single voter base. Buttigieg failed to crack double digits with non-white voters, with a reported two percent of black voters choosing him in Nevada. Klobuchar registered under five percent. Although Biden had more consistent support among non-white voters, even beating Sanders among black voters, his appeal was limited by age, with the NBC early voters poll showing him at five percent among voters under 45.
Red scare
Sanders’ rise in the polls, coupled with consistent results, has sent shockwaves through the American political establishment.
Bashing “mainstream media” is a dangerous and misguided tactic – Trumpian above all else. This election cycle has shown, however, that anti-Bernie bias in the media is far from a loony conspiracy theory. Some coverage ranges from misleading to outrageous. Earlier this month, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd took talking points from a conservative publication, calling Sanders’ online supporters a “digital brown-shirt brigade”. His colleague, Chris Matthews, is facing calls to resign after comparing Sanders’ win in Nevada to the Nazi defeat of France in 1940.
The bias runs deeper than TV punditry. Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, and other senior campaign figures have criticised the Washington Post for biased coverage. The criticism is far from new – during Sanders’ 2016 campaign the Post came under fire by a media watch group for running 16 negative stories about Bernie Sanders in 16 hours. Some columnists, like Jennifer Rubin, are providing around the clock anti-Bernie messaging from their Twitter feeds, offering little nuance along the way.
Anand Giriharadas, known for his book critical of philanthropy by the ultra-rich, is one of the few pundits on MSNBC who does not share the network’s view on Bernie Sanders. Reacting to the result he said: “many in this elite are behaving like aristocrats in a dying regime — including in media.”
With weeks of headlines like “Bernie Sanders hits a ceiling in first primary contests”, most major news outlets have been unfairly underplaying his support. With his result in Nevada showing better crossover appeal than any other candidate, the coverage has aged poorly, to say the least. All available data is showing that Sanders has the best chance at assembling a diverse coalition of voters, making claims of a ceiling look misguided.
This is not the first time media outlets have mistaken a strong and extreme base for support for a ceiling. As Nate Silver blithely wrote, he “shudders to think of the question in part because of bad memories from four years ago”. Media outlets in 2016 were not ready to believe that a person like Donald Trump could win the Presidency. The political context had shifted significantly and today, it has become unrecognizable from ten years prior. Todd, Matthews, and Shapiro might not want to believe that Sanders can win. To continue spreading doubts about his candidacy that fly in the face of empirical data would be an affront to the “party unity” that they claim Sanders undermines.
Nevada has shown that the argument that Sanders lacks broad support does not hold water outside of Washington DC. It is past time for the Democratic establishment to admit as much.