The 2020 Democratic Candidates and Their Coalitions, by Amy Walter, was included in the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup, but there was so much good stuff there it might have gotten lost. It’s really a must-read, and you can find it here.
For Daily Kos readers, it should be a good reminder that we’re not the American electorate. We’re not the Democratic electorate, either.
There’s been a great deal of chatter here about a new revolution, creating “new voters” and not doing things “the same old way.” But if you look at the actual electorate, not the people ranting at each other on orange websites, but the people who really vote, you’ll see something different. And that’s not inconsistent with a clear-eyed view of reality, rather than a dreamy-eyed view of what-we-want. In 2016 Sanders made headline after headline, coming on like gangbusters and blowing everybody away with huge rallies of enthusiastic youngsters on college campuses. But then people started to vote. Older people voted. African Americans voted. Moderate and conservative Democrats who have never even heard of Daily Kos voted.
The same thing will happen in 2020.
So let’s look at the piece, shall we? I’ll do a bit of cut-and-pasting, but I encourage everybody to actually read it.
Understanding where individual candidates stand among key demographic groups is critical in understanding the battle for the Democratic nomination.
That’s the premise of the whole piece. Look at who actually votes to predict who will win.
Walter looked at recent polls, a whole bunch of recent polls. She identified the Monmouth poll as an outlier (as did Monmouth and everybody else), and she notes that in the piece. So she looks at xis others, which are remarkably consistent. And she finds:
Biden is strongest among older, African-American, and moderate/conservative Democratic primary voters. Sanders is strongest among younger voters, while Warren is strongest among the most liberal voters and those with a college degree. That's not a new discovery, of course. What was striking, however, is how consistent these coalitions were among all the different polls — regardless of what the head-to-head poll numbers showed.
But it’s not just who makes up your coalition, but the strength of your coalition:
While Sanders does best among younger voters, he doesn't rack up the large margins with these voters that Biden does among older voters. Scroll along the age breakouts in the chart and you see Biden with double-digit leads among voters over 45-years-old. Meanwhile, Sanders' lead among 18-34-year-olds is in the single digits. In the Quinnipiac poll, for example, Sanders takes 31 percent to Warren's 25 percent, and Biden pulls up with just 10 percent. But, among those over the age of 65, Biden has an almost 30 point lead over his closest competitor (Warren), while Sanders sits at just 4 percent.
Why does this matter so much?
Because older voters (those over the age of 45), make up 60 percent of the overall Democratic electorate. And, it's not just nationally. Older voters made up anywhere from 59 to 65 percent of the electorate in the first four voting states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.
And there’s one other thing driving candidate selection:
Democratic primary voters are more interested in electability than we've seen in recent memory. The CNN poll found that 54 percent of Democrats preferred a candidate who had a strong chance to beat Trump, compared to 39 percent who preferred a nominee who shares their positions of major issues.
This will not be an opinion welcome on Daily Kos. Too many people here are making their arguments, not around evidence, but around their own desires. Those who prefer Sanders argue ‘we need a revolution to create the necessary tsunami.” Those who prefer Warren tell us, ‘it’s time for the old white guys to stop aside.’ But bloggers and activists won’t pick the person to run against Trump, and they won’t pick who wins in November of 2020. Voters will. And they don’t look much like the people who write diaries and comments (and come back to see if anybody responded to their comments, and comment in response, and come back to see if anybody responded to their response, ad infinitum, and yes, I’m guilty of that as much as anybody). They look like the people who said to themselves, “maybe he’ll shake things up,” in polling booths in Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And if we want to beat Trump, we need to remember that.