Yes, Sanders Would Have Won: Exploding False Clintonite Narratives

Clintonites in the press and the Democratic party, sometimes aided and abetted by Hillary Clinton herself, have spun a number of narratives to explain--or, more to the point, to explain away--the embarrassing failure of the Clinton campaign in the 2016 presidential race and continue to labor to generate from them, by mere repetition, an artificial Conventional Wisdom about the outcome of the election. These narratives tend toward the self-serving and self-exculpatory--Clinton and her people are never said to have done anything wrong--and for the most part, range from grossly misleading to entirely false. The campaign generated a great deal of data and collectively, they stand as a bulwark against these misrepresentations. If, that is, anyone bothers to consult them.

"It's Bernie Sanders' fault Trump won," runs a popular one. "He fatally weakened Clinton by putting her through such a grueling primary contest."

Baked into this is a rather irritating sense of entitlement on the part of the Clintonites, one that turns up through many of their narratives. In this case, they're rejecting the notion that the party nomination should be conducted via a vigorously contested democratic process and asserting, instead, the view that their candidate was entitled to a coronation, free of serious challenge. During the campaign itself, there had already appeared a variation on this, when members of the party Establishment began posing as Noble Statesmen thoughtfully looking out for the greater good by insisting, from fairly early in the race, that Sanders should drop out, endorse Clinton and try to "unify the party" so that it may better face the Republican nominee in the fall. All of these insiders had, of course, endorsed Clinton and were, in this, merely doing their part for their candidate by trying to create the impression that there was something wrong with Sanders contesting the nomination. Toward the end of the race, this became so intense that it temporarily affected Sanders' favorability ratings. For anyone who accepts the basic premise of a party primary system, the sense of entitlement that underlies these notions is a non-starter. During the 2008 Democratic contest, Hillary Clinton herself had, by the end of February, virtually no statistical chance of winning yet continued to battle Barack Obama right into June, reluctantly dropping out only a few days after the last round of state contests.

Clinton had turned that earlier contest into a bitter, ugly fight--at one point, she'd openly fantasized about her (more popular) opponent being murdered--which added more and more baggage to the substantial pile she'd already accumulated (and would continue to accumulate). Even in 2008, she'd been an anachronism, a tired throwback to 1990s conservative "New Democrats" trying to sell herself to an increasingly liberal electorate that wanted "hope and change." Entering the 2016 race, she was the weathered face of a way of doing business a lot of people thought they'd finally rejected and buried nearly a decade earlier. This is a chart of Clinton's favorability rating averages from 31 Jan., 2013--as far back as Real Clear Politics allows one to make these interactive charts--to 31 Jan., 2016, the day before the Iowa caucus:

HuffPost Pollster uses a lot of the same polls as RCP but includes some that RCP doesn't and its database goes back farther and thus offers both a slightly different and a longer-running look at the matter. But the story is the same:

Clinton's favorability ratings were in long-term decline. That Huffpost chart begins in Sept. 2010 because that's when they began dropping (and it runs through to the present). By the Huffpost data, Clinton's approval average dropped below 50%--the dead zone--in July 2014, never to return. RCP puts that landmark a little later, in mid-March 2015. In mid-April, when Clinton officially entered the presidential race, her average was, by both data sets, underwater, with more people telling pollsters they disliked her than liked her. And it stayed underwater. It's still there today.

Clinton's weakness was apparent even among Democrats. In a poll that wrapped 8 days before she entered the presidential race, Gallup asked, "Who would you like to see the Democratic party nominate for president in 2016--Hillary Clinton or someone else?" Over 1/3 of Democratic respondents--38%--chose "someone else," along with 43% of Dem-leaning independents.

The unpopularity that proved Clinton's undoing wasn't brought on by Bernie Sanders. Rather, it was just a continuation of a very long-running trend. When, in either the Summer of 2014 (Huffpost) or the early Spring of 2015 (RCP), Clinton's average finally fell below 50% then went underwater, Sanders wasn't yet even a factor. In a March 2015 "people in the news" poll by Gallup, 62% of respondents said they'd never even heard of him, and another 14% said they didn't know enough about him to have an opinion. For a long time, he was one of American politics' best-kept secrets in the press (I'll return to that later). In a YouGov poll conducted at the end of April--the period when Sanders entered the presidential race--53% of adult respondents had never heard of him and only 9% of registered voters were then supporting his bid to become the Democratic nominee. And so on.

One of Clinton's major weaknesses was, of course, that voters didn't find her honest and trustworthy. As with her approval ratings, these numbers, too, had been disintegrating over an extended period before Sanders came on the scene. The data recording this are a bit more spotty. Clinton had left the State Department and was a private citizen for over 2 years before announcing her presidential run; pollsters tend not to systematically track such things until election season rolls around. CNN/Opinion Research offers the following through a series of polls:

During the campaign season, the ABC News/Washington Post poll proved to be a pro-Clinton poll, meaning it tended to yield results slightly more favorable to Clinton than her polling average,[1] but it told the same story. In May, 2014, it had asked, "Do you think Hillary Clinton is or is not honest and trustworthy?" At the time, 59% of registered voters said she was. By May, 2015 though, this was the chart included with the poll results on this question:

A Quinnipiac poll from mid-April: "American voters say 54–38 percent that Clinton is not honest and trustworthy, a lower score than top Republicans." And so on. When Sanders entered the presidential race on 30 April 2015, Clinton was already in trouble.[2]

The Democratic primary campaign did Clinton's numbers no favors, to be sure but enhanced exposure to Hillary Clinton never does. Her poll numbers have only ever been good when she's mostly out of public sight and mind. Whenever she's becomes a center of attention and is perceived as a partisan political figure, they sink. This isn't a Bernie Sanders-induced phenomenon either; it's a pattern that has been present throughout the whole of her time on the national stage. Nate Silver of 538 was writing about--and charting--it as far back as 2012. Silver revisited this theme in 2013. In Sept. 2015, as Clinton's polling continued to crash, Greg Sargent at the Washington Post's Plum Line covered it as well. Though none of these commentators offer the thought, it's also entirely reasonable to assume that all of those crashes would eventually have a cumulative effect, with each new occurrence reminding people why they'd come to dislike her in the past.

This writer covered most of this ground in real time in various internet venues during the long 2015-'16 campaign season. For anyone who bothered to look, the seeds of Clinton's eventual destruction were right there in the often-brutal data. A few items from my notes:

--A Fox News poll, conducted in May 2015 (only days after Sanders threw his hat in the ring):

--An August 2015 poll by Qunnipiac open-endedly asked respondents to say the first word that comes to mind when the name of a candidate is mentioned. The top 3 words for Hillary Clinton were "liar", "dishonest" and "untrustworthy."

--An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from October 2015 asked,

"Now, which of the following best describes how you would feel if Hillary Clinton were elected president--optimistic and confident that she would do a good job, satisfied and hopeful that she would do a good job, uncertain and wondering whether she would do a good job, or pessimistic and worried that she would do a bad job?"

A plurality--a whopping 43%--chose "pessimistic and worried," with another 13% choosing "uncertain and wondering." Only 24% chose "optimistic and confident," with 19% opting for "satisfied and hopeful." That same poll asked respondents to rank, on a scale of 1 to 5, how "honest and straightforward" they saw Clinton: 40% chose 1--the lowest rating--with another 10% choosing 2 (only 13% chose 5, with another 13% choosing 4).

--When a CNN/ORC poll in mid-December 2015 asked if Clinton was "someone you would be proud to have as president," 56% answered in the negative. Asked in that same poll if Clinton "shares your values," 58% answered in the negative.

--In the head-to-head polling, Clinton's initially-commanding double-digit leads over Donald Trump had disappeared by August 2015. Here are the Clinton-vs.-Trump polls in the RealClearPolitics database from December 2015 and January 2016, the months leading into the first contest of the primary season:

When one takes into account the margin of error (listed in the column marked "MoE"), Clinton was in a statistical tie with Trump in five of the 11 polls, is only leading by one point in a sixth, two in a seventh and only beats Trump by a significant margin in the four that remain. Additionally, a Zogby poll, a CNN/ORC poll and two Morning Consult polls from January (here and here), not included in the RCP collection, also showed the two in a tie (a third Morning Consult poll that month gave Clinton a 4-point-over-MoE lead over Trump).

During this same period, Clinton fared even worse in the head-to-heads against the other major GOP contenders. Of the 9 Clinton-vs.-Ted Cruz polls, one had Cruz winning by 3 points over MoE, one had Clinton winning by 0.5% and the rest were ties. Of the 9 polls matching Clinton against Marco Rubio, Rubio beat Clinton by 6 points in one and was tied with her in the other 8.

All of this before a single vote in the primary season had been cast.

For this writer, Clinton's weakness as a candidate seemed obvious all along and I'd shared that thought (and the considerable supporting data behind it) throughout the campaign, most often on various Facebook groups. By the end of February 2016, I assembled my accumulated thoughts into an article that handicapped Clinton and her candidacy. The present article is very much a companion piece and sequel to it. Interested readers can check it out--I've tried not spend too much time recovering the same ground. Briefly, Clinton, laden with more baggage than anyone else in American politics, was running as a Democrat in the shadow of a two-term Democratic administration, which is always a hard sell, but instead of trying to differentiate herself from the incumbent or blaze any sort of new course (which voters want), she tried to present herself as Obama's Siamese twin for short-term gain. The ultimate Establishment figure in a screamingly anti-Establishment election, she was an opportunistic flip-flopper whose instincts, in a liberal party, were conservative, who positively oozes insincerity and who ran a demoralizing and utterly defeatist "No, We Can't" primary campaign peddling diminished expectations and aimed at crushing, by whatever means necessary, the energizing "hope" candidate who had sprang up as an alternative. The myth of her inevitability, carefully nurtured by Clinton and her surrogates in the press, appeared to have been depressing interest in the Democratic contest. She ran a horrible campaign, making all the wrong calls, pointlessly antagonizing the Sanders voters she was going to need to win and wasting time and resources trying to recruit "moderate" Republicans and flip red states that obviously weren't going to flip while ignoring states she was going to need to win. Throughout all of this, the Democratic party Establishment seemed to be under some sort of suicidal spell, closing its eyes, plugging its ears and chanting to drown out reality while, come Hell or high water, it pushed ahead with a campaign that seemed not only doomed but obviously doomed (I certainly predicted, early on, that Clinton would probably lose any general-election match-up against Trump). Clintonites, whose machinations have now saddled the U.S. with the Trump regime, are constructing these false narratives with the aim of absolving themselves but the hard, inescapable truth, now born out by the predictable election outcome itself, is that Clinton was always a weak, loser candidate and if the goal was to beat the Republican nominee, it was never responsible to back her in the first place. In a sane world, the Clintonites, their Master Candidate defeated by a reality-show joke of an opponent, have now been as utterly discredited as anyone in American politics can be with their pants still on.

And to finally tackle the other of the big, false Clintonite narrative, yes, Bernie Sanders probably would have beaten Donald Trump. Not only that, there's significant evidence he may have rolled right over Trump in a complete rout the likes of which the American presidency hasn't seen in a few decades.

Sen. Bernie Sanders was much beloved in his home sate of Vermont but when he launched his presidential campaign, he was virtually unknown to the broader public. For most of 2015, much of the corporate press tried to keep it that way, carrying out what became known as the "Bernie Blackout." Even basic name-recognition was pretty long in coming. What little coverage Sanders received in 2015 often had a dismissive and/or mocking tone and this mingled with the general lack of coverage to negatively impact the candidate's numbers for some time. When he eventually started to break through this effort to ignore him to death and became a genuine threat to Clinton's candidacy, much of the press switched to the usual Rabid Attack-Dog Mode always reserved for left candidates who become popular, buttressed, in this case, by the slanderous assaults of the Clintonites, both in the press and in the Democratic party. Despite these prolonged efforts to bury he and his candidacy, Sanders persevered and when people finally began to get to know him, they found they liked him. A lot. Most of the public's good will toward Clinton was already history when Huffpost Pollster started keeping track of Sanders' favorability ratings and while hers steadily sank into oblivion, here's the arc of Sanders' own over the course of the last 21 months:

The more people saw of Sanders, the more they liked what they saw, but the Blackout delayed his ability to build that profile with the public. In mid-Sept. 2015--nearly 5 months into his campaign--1/3 of respondents were still telling Gallup they'd never even heard of him. Sanders' net favorability among Democrats eventually shot past Clinton's but that only happened in late March, nearly 2 months into voting (and nearly a year into the campaign). As the primaries neared their end, Sanders had--again, among Democrats--a whopping 13-point net favorability advantage over Clinton.

These numbers suggest that if there had been no Blackout, no imposition of that early, months-long delay in Sanders being able to introduce himself to the public, the primaries may have turned out very differently.

One of the manifestations of the Blackout is that, when it came time to sanction head-to-head polls, news organizations frequently matched Republican hopefuls against only Clinton, pretending as if Sanders didn't exist. There is, as a consequence, less data in this area than with Clinton but there's still more than enough to tell the story. The RealClearPolitics database contains 46 head-to-head polls matching Sanders against Trump between 20 July, 2015 and 5 June, 2016. Of that, Trump only managed to beat Sanders above the margin of error 3 times, the most recent of these happening way back in mid-November 2015. In another 4, they were in a statistical tie. The last of the latter happened in mid-February; from there forward, the chart below tells the story: Sanders won every poll, all but three of them by dominant double-digit leads:

To the 46 polls at RCP, we can add 18 Morning Consult polls:

In all but two of these, Sanders is beating Trump by double digits above the margin of error. Ipsos/Reuters also conducted 7 Sanders-vs.-Trump polls from late January to mid-March; Sanders won all of them.[3]

In the last full month in which Sanders was included in the head-to-heads, he was still rolling right over Trump, while the Clinton vs. Trump polling was previewing what would eventually happen in the general: Clinton was statistically tied with Trump in 6 of that month's 10 polls and losing to him above the MoE in a seventh:

With one exception (covered later), there's a gap in the Sanders/Trump head-to-head polling after the primary season but in his favorability polling during that period, Sanders continued to rise, averaging nearly 60% favorable by the month of September, at which point polling orgs either stopped polling on it or RCP stopped recording their results. Through that same period, the monthly average favorability polling for both Clinton and Trump were statistically flat-lined, Clinton at an embarrassing 40-43%, Trump at a slightly worse 35-39%.

From shortly after he entered the race, Sanders was a star in ascendance, Clinton one in decline. These tracks crossed too late to land Sanders the Democratic nomination but if he had been the nominee, it seems pretty unlikely Trump--disliked by most Americans from the day he entered the race--would have been able to significantly enough alter Sanders' trajectory to eke out a win.

Clinton lost the election in the Rust Belt. That is the correct characterization. Trump didn't win those critical states, the ones that gave him the election; she lost them. Large portions of these states, which were the industrial heartland of America, have, for decades, been devastated by policies aimed at deindustrializing the U.S. in the name of corporate profits. Heading into this election, Pennsylvania and Michigan had been blue states for a quarter-century, Wisconsin had been for even longer. Clinton is a Wall-Street-backed, tone-deaf "free trader" who, whenever there's an election in front of her, comes out against the latest grant-superpowers-to-the-multinationals proposal--that which is misleadingly sold as "free trade"--then "evolves" back to supporting them as soon as she's in power. Presented with this living embodiment of the policies that had laid waste to their homes, it isn't at all surprising that a large number of voters in these states, the long-suffering victims of these policies, cast their lot with Trump, the first general-election candidate who seriously promised to do anything about their situation. Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by razor-thin margins (0.23%, 0.73% and 0.77%, respectively) while underperforming--often grossly underperforming--Obama's 2012 take among white voters (particularly white males), young voters and independents. Her campaign did just about as badly as any Democratic campaign would ever do in those states.[4] As the primary results and electoral history in those states suggested, many there would have preferred a more sane alternative like Sanders, something the Democrats, once Clinton became the nominee, weren't offering anymore. Winning a primary is, of course, very different from winning a general--something that shouldn't be understated--but Sanders had, in these states, won huge, lopsided majorities among those demographics in which Clinton so badly underperformed. He'd already defeated Clinton in contests in two of these three states. Sanders was performing better than Clinton in the head-to-head polling vs. Trump in all three states as well. The final Michigan poll to match both Democratic contenders against the Republican was conducted by the Detroit News. In it, Clinton was statistically tied with Trump, while Sanders was beating him by 19 points. In Pennsylvania, it was a Quinnipiac poll that had Clinton statistically tied with Trump, with Sanders beating him by 6 points--3 above the margin of error. In Wisconsin, the last was a Marquette poll that had Clinton beating Trump by 9--4 points over MoE--and Sanders beating Trump by 24--19 points over MoE.

For obvious reasons, Clintonites who maintain that Sanders would have lost to Trump retreat from the hard data, preferring, instead, to rely on nebulous, unquantifiable assertions. Americans, it's said, would never vote for a candidate who, like Sanders, identifies himself as a "socialist." And, indeed, one can point to polling data wherein people say as much. The only thing such polls really measure, though, is respondents' reaction to a contentious word. This is a phenomenon well-known by pollsters. One of the most remarked-upon examples in recent years occurs in polling on the Obama healthcare law. If pollsters ask about "the Affordable Care Act," the name of the law, it draws much better numbers than if, instead, they refer to it as "Obamacare," a word that causes the numbers to go down, even though it refers to exactly the same policy. For many years, there were few more demonized words in American political discourse than "liberal." As a consequence, the number of people who self-identify to pollsters as "liberal" was anemic. Today, it's difficult to find a single issue of major import on which Americans don't hold to a liberal view by overwhelming margins, yet the overwhelming majority of that same public--76% in Gallup's 2016 survey--identifies as either "moderate" or "conservative" (and "conservative" has significantly outnumbered "liberal" for decades). The one word in our political discourse that has been more demonized than "liberal"--both much more intensely and for much longer--is "socialism." What really matters here isn't in-the-abstract public reaction to a word. What Sanders defines as his "democratic socialism" is a slate of policies, one with, for the most part, immense public support. Last year, co-writer/researcher Mitch Clark and I put together a fairly extensive article about the polling data on Bernie Sanders' major issues and found that most of his top agenda items are supported by huge majorities of the public, often even by majorities of Republicans.

Hold that thought.

Another of these fuzzy Clintonite claims--a sort of corollary to the first, really--is that Sanders never faced any real political attacks and that his campaign would have withered in the face of them. For anyone who lived through the 2016 campaign cycle, the first part of that amounts to a "don't believe your lying eyes" claim--ludicrous on its face. Clinton, who, herself, mercilessly pounded Sanders with constant--and mostly scurrilous--attacks, contributed to it, saying, "I don't think [Bernie Sanders has] had a single negative ad ever run against him," a claim Politifact debunked. Adam Johnson at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting tackled the wider claim in even more detail, pointing out that it's an empty, unfalsifiable assertion, outlining only a sample of the savage attacks Sanders had weathered and noting the obvious:

"Is there some undiscovered bombshell waiting to blow up about Sanders? Of course, it’s possible he murdered someone with his bare hands in a Calcutta bazaar in 1991—we can’t know for sure. What one has to believe in order to accept the entirely theoretical assumption that a damning piece of news about Sanders awaits to be revealed is that the Clinton team, armed with $186 million dollar warchest, either A) can’t find something the GOP will or B) found something but is just too darn nice to expose it. Neither of these scenarios seems plausible."

With commanding leads over the Republican, Sanders' campaign would have to do a lot of withering--and his meteoric momentum throughout the campaign would have to be blunted then reversed--to pull defeat from the jaws of victory, and there just didn't seem to be much out there with which to beat him back. And who was going to do it? Well...

Donald Trump's numbers throughout the presidential race were abysmal, his favorables typically even worse than Clinton's. From Day 1, a majority of Americans disliked him. On election day, his RCP average stood at 39.4% favorable, while Clinton's was at 41.6% --a tie that made them the two most disliked major-party presidential candidates in the history of polling.[5] Just as with Clinton, a majority of respondents consistently told pollsters they didn't consider him "honest and trustworthy." In a Quinnipiac poll, for example, only 37% thought he was. But in that same poll, only 30% would say the same of Hillary Clinton. In fact, of the 7 different candidates then in the race about whom that question was asked, Clinton scored the lowest.[6] The highest-scoring candidate, on the other hand, beat everyone else in a rout. Matching a pattern that continued throughout the campaign, a whopping 68% said they found Bernie Sanders honest and trustworthy. Even 54% of Republicans said so. That poll was conducted on Feb. 10-15, 2016, only days after the primary/caucus contests had started.

Something to keep in mind while you're sitting in front of the evening news tonight watching the protofascist buffoon in the White House trying to dismantle the liberal society with strokes of the pen. It didn't have to be this way.

Hillary Clinton's followers, who backed a weak candidate who went on to lose, now tell you Sanders couldn't have beaten Trump. Consider what goes into that claim. Those offering it insist we ignore all the actual accumulated data (all of which suggests there would have been a significant Sanders win) and accept the proposition that, by the end of a Sanders-vs.-Trump contest, most voters would have decided to vote against a candidate they like and whose policies they love because of a word (SOCIALISM!) that candidate uses to describe those policies and would, instead, cast their ballots for a candidate they hate--the most disliked candidate in the history of polling, against whom Sanders would somehow do worse than did the 2nd-most-disliked candidate in the history of polling.

Yeah.[7]

I'm sure this will be argued--and fulminated over--endlessly but history's final word on the subject comes from a privately-commissioned Gravis poll that was conducted in November only two days prior to the general election. It asked likely voters for whom they would vote if the looming presidential contest were between Sanders and Trump. Readers will no doubt be shocked to learn that it, too, showed Sanders destroying Trump. Margin of victory: 12%.

The election is now a few months in the past and many would prefer to stop talking about Hillary Clinton, put aside the divisions of that ugly campaign and focus on the problem the U.S. has inherited as a result of it. It's a legitimate perspective. Whether or not his reactionary fanbase yet recognizes it, Trump is a threat to every American, to American society and to the entire world. Not just an embarrassment or the butt of a joke: a threat. A protofascist Twitter troll running the most powerful nation in the world is dangerous. This business of how he got there, however, is a matter that needs to be hashed out and it's not a distraction from dealing with Trump, it's a critical part of it, because if any of these false Clintonite narratives are allowed to harden into a Conventional Wisdom, nothing will have been learned. The Clintonites who brought about this calamity won't be held accountable for their part in it, won't be pushed aside in disgrace and will only try to do it again. And again. And there's an unreformed system still in place that would allow them to do it. Trump doesn't present an ordinary political situation that can afford to tolerate that.

--j.

---

[1] And to cut off the knee-jerk implication, that's not necessarily because of any unfair bias; much more likely just a quirk in the methodology.

[2] Clinton favorability ratings bottomed out at just a hair about 36% in late May 2016 before stabilizing in the low 40-percentile, where it remained for the rest of the campaign. Her "honest and trustworthy" ratings bottomed out around 27%, though some anomalous polls put it even lower.

[3] The Morning Consult and Ipsos/Reuters material is archived, with details and links, at HuffPost Pollster.

[4] CNN maintains a handy archive of exit poll data from the 2012 race, the 2016 primaries and the 2016 general.

[5] On election day, Gallup, the Grand Old Man of polling, reported that "the 2016 election is the only one in Gallup's polling history to feature two broadly unpopular candidates... Trump and Clinton are the two most negatively reviewed U.S. presidential candidates of the modern era, and probably ever."

[6] Pollsters sometimes directly pitted Clinton against Trump on this question. CNN did so in September and found that by a 50-35% split, respondents said Trump was more honest and trustworthy than Clinton.

[7] Trump certainly knew better. He said repeatedly he'd rather face Clinton than Sanders. Reince Priebus, then the head of the Republican party and now Trump's chief-of-staff and right hand, did as well.


Post-Credits Scene - The obvious caveat. Campaigns ain't static--it's are always about how you get there. Probabilities are just that.