The Bernie Sanders late surge trend

[paulthompson]

First off, I'm a Sanders supporter. And unfortunately, I think he's only a longshot to win the nomination at this point, barring some dramatic event. (Such as Clinton's e-mail scandal heating up, but that's another story.) That said, I think he's going to make the race for the nomination a lot closer than most people realize.

The reason? His late surge trend outside the South. Sanders simply has not caught on in the South, both with black and white voters. But all Southern states have voted by now, exept for border state Kentucky.

So let's look at the rest of the country. Sanders inevitably starts way, way behind in the polls. Then, as the election date gets nearer, he surges up. He doesn't always win, but he almost always does better than the polls had been predicting. So while Clinton supporters are crowing about polls showing Clinton with big leads in New York, Pennsylvania, and some other states, I wouldn't be so confident.

Here's a look at all the non-South results, in order of election date. (Note that most of the data comes from Real Clear Politics, including their final poll averages.)

Iowa - Sanders virtually tied after being down by about 20 points a month earlier.

New Hampshire - he beat the final poll average by about ten points.

Nevada - he lost by five points, but he did 18 points better than the one poll from a month and a half earlier.

Colorado - he beat the one prior poll by over 40 points!

Minnesota - he beat the latest poll by 50 points!

Massachusetts - he lost, but he beat the final poll average by five points.

Oklahoma - he beat the final poll average by 12 points.

Vermont - his support in his home state was already basically maxed out - he won the state with 86% of the vote. But even so, that was seven points better than the one poll from a week earlier.

Kansas - he beat the one poll from a week earlier by 45 points!

Nebraska - apparently, no polls were done at all.

Maine - he bettered the one poll by 15 points.

Michigan - he beat the final poll average by 20 points!

Illinois - he lost by two points, which was in line with the last three polls. But the two polls from a few days prior to those had him down by 40 points!

Missouri - two polls had Clinton leading by five points and seven points respectively. One late poll had Sanders leading by one point, and the state ended up a virtual tie, with Clinton winning by less than a thousand votes.

Ohio - this is a bit of an anomaly. Clinton won by 14 points, which is six points better than the average of the last polls. But still, Sanders did ten points better than the average of the three polls from the week prior to that.

Idaho - he beat the one prior poll by 54 points!

Utah - he beat the last poll by 51 points! Plus, two poll prior to that one were off by 15 more points.

Arizona - he lost by 18 points, but that was still 12 points better than the final poll average.

If that's not a trend, then nothing is! These are astonishing number shifts, probably unprecedented in primary elections. Sanders' victory in Michigan was said to be the second biggest primary upset of all time, beating the polls by 20 points. Yet he's beat the polls by ever bigger margins in six other states so far, and hardly anyone has commented about it! For instance, there's been no comment about this extraordinary trend by the folks at fivethirtyeight.com, who have often been astonishingly inaccurate with their predictions this election season.

Why does Sanders have these late surges? I think the answer is obvious. Many people don't like Hillary Clinton very much, but feel obliged to vote for her due to greater name recognition or a feeling Democrats should rally around the likely winner. According to a Quinnipac national poll from just yesterday, Clinton has a 39% like vs. 56 dislike rating, a difference of minus 17 points. Whereas a lot of people don't know Sanders well, but when they learn more about him they like him and want to vote for him. Sander has a 50 like vs. 37 dislike rating in that same poll, which is a difference of plus 13 points.

So Sanders is plus 13 and Clinton is minus 17 - that's an incredible difference between them! Sanders' favorability rating is the best of all the presidential candidates from either party. The only candidate more disliked that Clinton is Donald Trump. She and Trump are disliked more than any other major presidential candidates in the primary season in the history of polling favorability ratings, by a fair margin.

Sanders has a very tough road to win the nomination at this point. As Sanders himself has put it lately, he only has a "narrow path." But expect to see more late surges by him, making this a closer contest than most "experts" predict.

[Perogie]

1. Clinton has been running since 2006

With that much of a lead in name recognition it was an uphill battle, but damn Bernie kicked her butt around. Imagine if he had announced 6 months earlier. He would have really clobbered her.

[paulthompson]

8. I don't think so

I don't think it would have made much of a difference if he started six months earlier. Very few people are paying attention that far before the first primary. It wasn't like he had a late start compared to the typical campaign.

But had he run for president in some earlier election, even if he only would have been a minor candidate like a lot of the Republicans were this time, he would have gotten his name out there to the general public and thus had more of a head start. I must admit I'd hardly heard of him prior to his presidential campaign taking off.

[FreakinDJ]

2. a closer contest than most "experts" predict.

[ReallyIAmAnOptimist]

3. Thank you for posting...

[GreatGazoo]

4. After Michigan there have been theories about how the polls have been off so often and so far

One interesting one was Greenberg's "Poll Defying Pattern" for HuffPo which includes this yuuge graphic:



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-greenberg/polldefying-pattern-predi_b_9434118.html

Also, 538's own mea culpa after calling for a 99% chance of Hillary to take Michigan:

Bernie Sanders made folks like me eat a stack of humble pie on Tuesday night. He won the Michigan primary over Hillary Clinton, 50 percent to 48 percent, when not a single poll taken over the last month had Clinton leading by less than 5 percentage points. In fact, many had her lead at 20 percentage points or higher. Sanders’s win in Michigan was one of the greatest upsets in modern political history....

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-the-stunning-bernie-sanders-win-in-michigan-means/

[SheilaT]

5. Then there are such things as the fact that

for the past fifty years Kansas has correctly predicted the eventual Democratic nominee every single time. Sure, it could be wrong this year, but Bernie is building his support.

This past Tuesday he won more delegates than did Hillary, although the way the MSM has reported it, you'd think only Arizona had a primary -- well, it's true that the other two were caucuses -- but he still got more delegates.

And tonight Bernie is apparently going to fill up a 54,000 seat venue.

If despite all this Hillary gets the nomination, and wins the election only because Trump is such a total fuck-wad, she will have very little support outside the party elite. In fact, with her at the head of the ticket, down ticket races will suffer tremendously. On the other hand, if Bernie is the standard bearer, there will be an incredible amount of enthusiasm for him and I predict Dems to pick up seats everywhere.

Notice my use of "if". I could well be wrong, and I know that.

But I really, really hope I'm right.

[Jitter65]

6. No one has been maligned (fairly or unfairly) as much has Hillary for over 20 years.

if you can still get out of bed in the morning after the brutal thrashings she has taken speaks volumes about your strength and character, to me. Most all of the accusations against her have been unproven or proven false or just plain half-truths and cherry-picked, out of context quotes.

No other candidate running today has had to ever face what she has had to face, especially Bernie.
Demeaning those people who have supported her because they know her best is not a way to bring the party together, although I believe that Sanders' intentions are not to bring the party together at all because he has no vested interest in doing so. In fact, he has spent the greater part of his political career doing exactly what he is doing now.."artful smearing" of the party.

Like another poster here as said, the Democrat party, with all its problems and shortcomings, has been the only thing standing between many blacks, latinos, and women and the ultra right-wing bigots who would like to relegate them to second-class citizens or actually non-citizens. For that, the "establishment" of the party is appreciated by those who have lived through the suffering...not those who protested it...but actually had to live through it. Most of Bernie's supporters today have no idea about what that means and they feel that the least infringement of their entitlements and freedoms is just cause for an all out "revolution" to destroy what so many regard as a firewall against trampling of their own freedoms and quality of life.

[rhett o rick]

7. That's all fine and good but she sides with the big money over the 99%. She has

been very successful at amassing a huge wealth from those that want something from our government. She has supported drug laws that have filled our Prisons For Profits that have been happy to share their profits with her. She couldn't wait to betray us and help her good friend George Bush when he asked. She even promulgated his lies on the Senate floor. She shares in responsibility for the million dead Iraqis. She and Bill have amassed $150,000,000 and are giving the lower classes the bird.

[uponit7771]

13. More maligning, she and Sanders voted the same 93 % of the time, this gets crazy sounding

[rhett o rick]

15. She doesn't agree with him on anything. Did you watch the debates?

Here is a list of issues that the two are miles apart:

We want to Strengthening Social Security (e.g., raising the cap)
We are Opposed to job killing "Free Trade" agreements
We are opposed to fracking for oil company profits over people's water
We want to help college students afford college (telling them to get a job doesn't cut it)
We support making major corps pay their fair share of taxes
We want to end the unregulated domestic spying and making the NSA/CIA Security State have oversight.
Also end drone killing of terrorist "suspects" in foreign lands (100 innocents killed for each suspect)
We are for reducing the defense budget
We are for taking a hard stand against torture and indefinite detention.
We support the end of the militarization of our local police forces.
We want to end Prisons for Profits
We support legalizing marijuana esp. for medical use.
We believe in the need for funding rebuilding our neglected infrastructure.
We support single payer health insurance.
We want to see the regulation of Wall Street (e.g. reinstate Glass-Steagall)
We want to break up the big bank and media monopolies.
We are against American Exceptionalism and an excuse for neocon imperialism.

[paulthompson]

9. A couple more things

There's a couple more things I wanted to mention.

One is the South. There was no late Sanders surge in the Southern states. I think there's a couple of reasons for this. One is that he's had an unusually difficult time getting black voters to support him, and they make up the majority of Democratic voters in some Southern states. One can argue why that is, but that's what the data shows. (He's done a lot better with Latino voters in some places, for instance getting about half of the Latino vote in Illinois and Nevada.)

The other reason is that most of the Southern state primaries came on or close to Super Tuesday, and he just didn't have the time or money to seriously campaign in every state then. So he decided to focus on some (non-Southern) states and all but ignore others. There were a bunch of Southern states like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, etc, where he didn't appear in person a single time and didn't run any ads at all. So it's no surprise his numbers didn't change in those states.

One interesting thing is what happened in Florida and North Carolina. He did have a whole week to campaign in those two states, although he also had three other big states that same week. In Florida, he didn't make any headway. But Florida is a closed primary and he's had more trouble with those. Also most people vote early there, so a late surge wouldn't help much. But in the North Carolina semi-closed primary he did make a late surge. He still lost by 14 points, but he did better than the final poll average by ten points. And that was just with one week of campaigning, with four other big states the same week.

So I think he would have done better in the South if he had more time and money to contest them. As a general rule, the more voters get to know him, the more they like him. He probably wouldn't have won those states outright (due to his trouble with black voters), but he could have narrowed the gap some and gotten a lot more delegates.

But back in the 1980s, conservative Democrats created Super Tuesday with lots of conservative Southern states placed early specifically to help ensure that the establishment candidate with lots of name recognition and money would beat any insurgent. I'm sad to say that strategy was fairly successful this time around. It's remarkable Sanders did as well as he did with the primary calendar specifically designed to bring an early end to campaigns like his.

My second point is that while I think Sanders is only a longshot to win the nomination at this point, I do think there's a real chance Clinton's e-mail scandal will blow up in a big way. News reports say the FBI is going to decide to indict or not by mid-May. So Sanders needs to keep it close, because all hell could break lose. (Even if Clinton is not indicted, damning information could come out, close Clinton aides could be indicted, and so on.) If that happens, then things like momentum and public perception are all important. If Sanders fades away between now and then, then a lot of establishment Democrats will say Sanders is too weak to compete with Trump, and they'll look for someone to sweep in and take Clinton's delegates. But if Sanders is running strong and closing the gap, it'll be much harder for Democrats to turn to someone else and claim Sanders doesn't deserve the nomination, if Clinton tanks or has to drop out.

I could be wrong about the e-mail scandal. The truth is, nobody really knows about it 100% for sure, except for the 100-plus FBI agents working on it. And by the way, that large number of agents in and of itself suggests there's something worth investigating there. Clinton supporters who say the scandal is a big nothing don't know what's in all those e-mails any more than anyone else in the general public at this point. We're in uncharted waters, and anything could happen between now and the convention.

[paulthompson]

12. And...

I just noticed one more thing. On election day voting in North Carolina, Sanders only lost to Clinton by four points, 52% to 48%. So that further strengthens the evidence that he could have done much better in the South if he only had more time and money to do so.

It'll be interesting to see the results in Kentucky, the one Southern state to have a later primary. Sanders may even get (gasp!) more than a whole week to campaign there.

[Chezboo]

10. Good stuff!

This is written by another Sanders supporter via the Huffpo... hard data that is in line with your op.

A Dozen Reasons Sanders Voters Are Justifiably Angry at the Media Right Now

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/20-reasons-sanders-voters-are-justifiably-angry_b_9544744.html?

[nadinbrzezinski]

11. As usual I wil be redoing my math

after each contest

[Socal31]

14. If he started receiving serious press even 3 months earlier....

What a different race it would be.

[amborin]

16. K&R

[paulthompson]

17. Further evidence

The Huffinton Post article linked elsewhere in this thread shows further evidence of Sanders's late surge trend:

In Illinois, she won the state narrowly (1.8%) but lost Election Day voting. Same thing in Massachusetts. Same thing in Missouri. ... Early voting in Ohio favored Clinton by more than 30 points, but she won the state by only 13.8%.

So we see Sanders would have won at least three more states if we look only at election day voting, and there's evidence he won the election day voting in Arizona too. I'm not against early voting by any means, but in the primaries so far, Sanders typically only has the week right before the vote to get his message out in a big way. He obviously does badly with those who vote before that.

I think this is a major reason why he does so well in caucuses vs. primaries, becaue in caucuses there is no early voting, and in many primary states, half or more of the people vote early.

[cloudythescribbler]

18. Good that you noted Ohio, but as a Mass Bernie voter, I remember some polls showing Bernie ahead

and his admittedly narrow loss was a disappointment.

I also can't understand how national polls (now more than one major reputable one) showing Bernie and Hillary in a virtual dead heat nationally while in state polls in NY, PA, NJ, CA, MD and elsewhere she still supposedly retains a commanding lead. These two sets of findings don't add up


Again, I am going to note in EVERY post from here on in a thread about the primaries that DUers should devote at LEAST 20% or MORE of the time AND MONEY focused on the presidential primary to supporting Democrats in House and Senate Congressional races

[paulthompson]

19. Yeah, Ohio was weird

Ohio bucked the "late surge" trend for sure. I think a lot of that had to do with the unusual situation with Trump at the time. It was a totally open primary, and everyone was saying that Kasich absolutely had to win the state or Trump would win the nomination for sure. So there was lots of cross over. If you dig down into the data, in some areas, over half of all Democrats voted in the Republican primary instead.

Even if Sanders and Clinton did strategic voting in roughly equal percentages, it would have hurt Sanders more due to his late surge tendency. (Meaning few would have been strategically voting in that way if they voted a couple of weeks early, since the "Trump must lose Ohio at all costs" idea only became big in the days before the election, with the last polls showing Trump and Kasich running neck and neck.)

Also, the thing about the state vs. national polls is that a lot of states have closed or semi-closed primaries, so the pollsters don't poll independent voters for those state polls. But Sanders does exceptionally well with independent voters, winning them about 70% to 30% on a consistent basis. And those people do count in the national polls, and they make up about a third of all voters.

That's why Clinton could easily win the nomination even though she has historically bad favorability ratings (with about 55% disliking her), and even though all the data shows Sanders would be a much stronger candidate against Trump. Clinton does especially badly with independent voters, and they often don't get to cast their votes in the primaries.

[paulthompson]

20. Again

I think I'm going to keep updating this as new primaries come along, to see if the trend continues.

Remarkably, there was only one poll in the three states voting today. In Alaska, the lone poll from January showed Clinton winning by three points, 44 to 41. In the actual election, Sanders won 81 to 19!

So from a three point deficit to a 63 point margin of victory! Wow!

I'll bet the reason there were virtually no polls in the three states today is because the polling companies are embarrassed at being so wrong about Sanders' late surges, over and over again. I would challenge anyone to find polls in the history of presidential polling that turned out to be more wildly inaccurate than the primary poll results in the past couple of weeks.