SA: The most succinct summary of the article would be this: in states that will be battlegrounds in a general election fight against Donald Trump, Hillary either loses outright, loses on Election Day, or dramatically under-performs her pre-Election Day polling.
The first is true, of course, in every battleground state (or potential battleground state) Sanders has already won (New Hampshire, Minnesota, Michigan, Colorado, Kansas, Utah, and Maine). The second is true in states where Hillary's lead in early voting--born in part of voters' lack of familiarity with Sanders at the time--evaporated once Election Day came and Sanders had become a known quantity (North Carolina, Arizona, Missouri, Illinois, and Ohio). And the third is true in several states that didn't go Sanders' way on Election Day but might well have done so had the Senator had even a week more to raise his profile still further from the absolute obscurity of a year ago (Iowa and Nevada). So when the fact that Sanders becomes more popular with voters the better they know him is coupled with the fact that Clinton generally--outside the Deep South, at least--becomes less popular the more voters know her, it becomes clear that the real shape of this race is not what we've been led to believe.
While some percentage of Clinton's success in early voting is certainly due to older voters being more likely to vote early, just today Brianna Keilar of CNN noted that the Clinton people have been saying for months that, in their view, the nation still doesn't know Sanders well. And that's exactly the point of my "Bernie Is Winning" article: the Clinton people pushed the early-voting vote as much as they could because they knew that, with each passing day, voters were getting to know Sanders better. And as I've noted was the case in the roster of states above, the better voters know the Senator, the more they like him.
JB: Please clarify something for me, before we go on. You mention North Carolina in your list of Election Day evaporating leads, but Sanders got trounced there. So, how does that figure into your theory?
SA: Sanders only lost Election Day voting in North Carolina 52% to 48%. When you consider that the recently passed voter-suppression statute in North Carolina led to thousands of college students being turned away from the polls--and Sanders wins that demographic, nationally, roughly 80% to 20%--it's clear that the "live" voting in North Carolina (i.e., the voting that happened on Election Day) was more or less a tie. That's why Clinton won in North Carolina by ten points less than the polls pre-election were predicting.
JB: Okay. That was helpful. Can the Sanders campaign use your findings to their advantage somehow? Does your article have practical application for them? And if so, how?
SA: Absolutely. The Sanders campaign is right now marshaling hard data for their summer pitch to super-delegates. They can already claim that they out-perform Clinton among independents; in national polling against Trump; in battleground-state polling against Trump; among working-class men; and among millennials. What this article does is add to these powerful arguments an additional one: that in battleground states, Bernie Sanders more often wins the Election Day vote.
This matters because it fits a theme: Clinton becomes less popular with voters over time--which is saying something, given that she's already far less popular than Sanders is (her favorability rating is -21, whereas his is +11). But this same theme is also in evidence in the way the election season has played out: Clinton did best in the first half of the calendar, when Bernie was less well-known and the states voting were largely states the Democrats can't possibly carry in November, and Bernie is out-performing Clinton in the second half of the calendar, at a time when the states voting are the ones the Democrats will be most clearly targeting in the fall election. So this fourth dimension of analysis being added to the political equation--how the candidates perform over time, both in individual states and across-the-board--should and I believe will be a critical feature of the Sanders campaign's argument to super-delegates in Philadelphia.
JB: Anything you'd like to add before we wrap this up?
SA: Just that I hope everyone in the states that have yet to vote will make sure to come out and do so when it's their turn. This thing isn't over by a long-shot.
MSM spotlights Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders
(Image by DonkeyHotey) Details DMCA
JB: Not according to those pesky pundits! Any plans to get your article in the right hands, aka the Sanders campaign?
SA: No specific plans, but I'm happy to say that the eleven articles on the presidential election that I've written for The Huffington Post over the past three weeks have thus far been shared on Facebook more than 40,000 times. They've also received sufficient coverage in the mainstream media--by The Washington Post, Politico, FiveThirtyEight.com, and others--that I'm hopeful someone in the Sanders campaign has seen them and (as applicable) found a way to make use of them.
JB: I'm delighted that your articles are gaining traction; This one was a real eye-opener and antidote to the corporate media's mistreatment of the Sanders campaign, Seth. Thanks so much for talking with me today.
SA: My pleasure! Thanks so much for your questions.
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