Five Demographic Arguments for Bernie Sanders

 Because I wanted to give you something nice to look at (click to enlarge; source)

by Gaius Publius

I had something else set up for today, but I couldn't resist this. Carl Beijer has a good set of graphics comparing Sanders' and Clinton's voter bases and how they compare. I'll show a few then direct you to his site for the rest. I found this fascinating; also useful when the "he so white" arguments start up.

Beijer starts:

Five demographic arguments for Bernie Sanders

Clinton began the Democratic primaries with slight-to-significant leads across most demographic categories. Over the past year - even as the media has clung to that narrative - all of those leads have almost entirely evaporated. Here is a quick rundown of the state of the polls today; all of this data was taken from Reuters on March 25.

The five demographics, for your information, are gender, race, orientation, income and age. You might guess correctly the last two, though they are more nuanced than you'd suspect. About orientation, I'll leave you to look for yourself (hint: there's a surprise there I can't begin to explain).

But let's look here at gender and race, with a tiny peek at age. Beijer (my emphasis):

GENDER

Hillary Clinton's base of support is now largely men, and Sanders is supported by a majority of women.

That got my attention. Hillary is the candidate of males, primarily, and Sanders the candidate of women? Did not expect that. Here's the graphic:

Clinton support vs. Sanders support by gender; all ages (click to enlarge)

Now let's look at race:

RACE

Clinton maintains a significant lead among black Americans, driven entirely by the preference of older black Americans; black Millennials, however, prefer Sanders 59-31. Meanwhile, Sanders has built leads among Hispanics and other people of color, while maintaining a slight lead among white Americans.

And the graphic:

Clinton support vs. Sanders support by race; all ages (click to enlarge)

Because age was mentioned above, here's the graphic for that.

Clinton support vs. Sanders support by age; all races (click to enlarge)

Beijer concludes the obvious, though not what's being alleged. I'll let him say it, that

one can only call Clinton an advocate of the powerless by ignoring women, Hispanics and other non-black voters of color, ~30% of black Americans, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and other non-straights, the young, and the poor. The narrative being aggressively advanced by writers like Tomasky and Goldberg - that Sanders is the candidate of privilege - can only be made by a stunning degree of demographic gerrymandering that ignores the dramatic sea changes in preference that have taken place since the beginning of the campaign.

Again, there's more here (including that surprise in the orientation graphic), so I hope you click through. Sanders is, indeed, the opposite of the candidate of privilege — which is the whole point, isn't it?, of this year's electoral exercise.

(Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. If you'd like to help out, go here. If you'd like to "phone-bank for Bernie," go here. You can volunteer in other ways by going here. And thanks!)

GP