I’m a nerd. A total geek. I love politics, and I love numbers, and that makes me a pretty boring person to get stuck next to at a dinner party.
This primary season has been a fascinating one- polls, demographics, turnout trends… there has been no shortage of data to pore over and interpret and base predictions (and wild guesses) on.
Now that the voting is nearly over, we have a lot of data we can look back on and figure out just how we got to last night’s historic confirmation that Hillary Clinton will be the first woman nominated by a major party for President of the United States.
Despite what you may have heard in the news coverage, this was not a close race and has not been for a very long time. When it is all said and done, Hillary will lead in the popular vote by about 56-43, with a margin of about four million votes. Her pledged delegate lead will be about 400, and she will be nearly 1000 total delegates ahead of Bernie Sanders on the first ballot at the DNC if a role call vote is required.
Where did she earn such an impressive margin of victory? We’ve had a lot of discussions here at DailyKos over the last year. Was it demographics? Was it voting and registration rules in the various states? We can now look back over 56 contests and draw many conclusions about why Hillary won, and why she won by as much as she did.
Population
One reason Hillary’s lead is so strong is that she won in the places where there are the most people (and therefore, in most cases, the most delegates). Her delegate and popular vote lead is built on the fact that she won 9 of the 10 largest states in the Union (Bernie squeaked by in #10 Michigan). Of the top nine states, Clinton won all but Illinois by double digits and three of them (Texas, Florida, and Georgia) by more than thirty points. In fact, Sanders only won 6 contests in the top 25 largest states by population, and the average margin in these states was over 14 points in Clinton's favor. Big wins in big states helped power her massive lead in delegates and popular votes.
Open or Closed? Primary or Caucus?
Much has been made of the various forms the contests took, and they definitely had an impact on results, though not as much as some might imagine.
There have been 38 primaries and 19 caucuses. Clinton won twenty eight of the primaries and six of the caucuses. Obviously, as in her race against Barack Obama, caucuses were a clear weak point for the Clinton campaign. Luckily, caucuses tend to be held in smaller states with fewer delegates and there were half as many of them.
There were 24 closed contests and 33 open contests including caucuses and primaries. The results here are not quite so dramatically different. Clinton won 17 closed contests to Sanders’s 7 and won 17 open contests to Sanders’s 16. While Clinton clearly did better with closed contests than she did in open ones, she won most of both types. We do not see the dramatic reversal we do when it comes to caucuses vs primaries.
When you look at both together-
| 12 | 1 |
| 16 | 9 |
| 5 | 6 |
| 1 | 7 |
Hillary Clinton won 92% of closed primaries. Bernie Sanders won 88% of open caucuses. Open primaries went for Clinton 64% of the time and closed caucuses went for Sanders 55% of the time. Clinton’s ability to win the overwhelming majority of primaries (open or closed) combined with her ability to hold pretty even in the closed caucuses steamrolled Sanders’s advantage in the small number of open caucuses (which represented very few delegates overall).
Clearly the type of contest had some significant impacts on the race, but unless we eliminated primaries in favor of only caucuses Clinton would still likely have emerged with a very solid win regardless of whatever rule changes might have been suggested (or sued over) in various states.
Blue States, Red States, and Swing States
For the purposes of this look, I took a pretty generally accepted set of states for each category. We can quibble over which states are genuinely swing states, which ones might be swing states this year that haven’t been in the past, etc. but we have to start somewhere.
Blue and red states should be FAIRLY obvious, I would think. For today, we’re calling the following 11 states swing states- Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, Wisconsin, Colorado, Iowa, and New Hampshire.
Indiana and Missouri made the cut because President Obama won them in 2008, FYI.
Anyways- the record:
| 11 | 8 |
| 7 | 4 |
| 11 | 10 |
| 5 | 1 |
Clinton won more in every type of race. Contrary to the nonsense spread early in the race about Clinton winning insignificant general election states or doing the best with conservative voters, Sander’s best showing was in red states, his worst in swing states. Clinton won just as many blue states as she did red states, and won 64% of the swing states- often by large margins. Of the regions that TRULY don’t matter in the general election (the territories and Dems abroad) Clinton did very well. When DC votes next week, Clinton can almost certainly notch another blue “state” in her column, as well.
The bottom line is that Clinton did very well across the board, while it was actually SANDERS who was carried mainly by wins in red states.
Demographics
Somewhat unsurprisingly to those of us who were here in the heyday of DailyKos blogger Poblano (who some insist on calling Nate Silver for some reason) the real driving force in this primary race, as it was in 2008, was fairly simple demographics.
Those who follow Benchmark Politics have been able to see first-hand how demographic analysis of the states has outperformed even the best pollsters time and again through this cycle.
We saw the general shape of the race a year ago in the polling- Sanders did very well with young people and independents.
Clinton did very well with black voters, Latino voters, women, older voters, and self-identified Democrats.
Those trends that first showed up in polling a year ago basically have not changed. Very few surprises have happened during this entire primary if you look at it through a lens of the demographics of the states voting.
Iowa and New Hampshire showed us Sanders's strength with young voters and independents in very white electorates. Nevada showed us for the first time that the demographics we were seeing in the polling would translate to the results in a relatively diverse electorate. South Carolina confirmed Clinton's strength with black voters that the Nevada results hinted at. Super Tuesday confirmed the demographic realities again, giving Clinton huge margins in states with large populations of black and/or Latino voters.
The same story has played out in essentially every contest. The demographics of the Democratic electorate give you a pretty good idea of how things are going to turn out. Adjust a bit for open vs closed, primary vs caucus, and you’ve got almost no surprises anywhere.
They say “demographics is destiny” and that was certainly true in this primary race.
Race was the number one determining factor in this primary. Age and Dem/Independent identification were the two other key ones. Gender was not as predictive, nor was ideology (some of Sanders’s strongest support came from voters calling themselves ‘moderate’ or ‘conservative’ in red states like West Virginia)
Bottom Line
Much of the "conventional wisdom" about this race is not true- Clinton did not win because of red states or because of moderate voters. Sanders did not do as well as he did because of large, enthusiastic turnout.
Sanders did not dominate in open primaries- he lost more than he won. Clinton didn’t have the rules “rigged” in her favor, either.
Clinton won her resounding victory because she built a broad and deep coalition of voters that represents the Democratic base. She won because she won the largest elections with the biggest turnout and the most diverse electorates. Sanders was buoyed by low turnout caucuses in small states with overwhelmingly white populations.
Hillary has won a powerful mandate from the base of the Democratic party, and won the nomination with a higher share of the popular vote in a primary contested through the end than any Democrat in history. Despite the concern trolling in the media, she now leads a Democratic party that is more unified behind her than we were at this point in 2008 behind Barack Obama.