The 2016 election cycle caught a lot of people in the U.S. by surprise. It featured the way-too-many candidates running for the Republican candidacy, the heated battle between Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton within the Deomocratic Party and (the grand finale of what seemed like the most dramatic political drama of all time) the victory of our current President Donald Trump. Want some more twists and turns?
According to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study by YouGov, 12 percent of voters who voted for Sanders (a Democratic socialist) in the primaries ended up voting for Donald Trump (a real estate tycoon and Republican) in the general election. Wait, what?
You read that right. According to this massive study that surveyed over 64,600 people, more than 1 in 10 of the voters who first chose the incredibly progressive Sanders switched sides in the end. Brian Schaffner, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts, broke down the data on Twitter:
Some asked for more detail on how Sanders primary voters behaved in general. This graphic shows this, including small % who abstained 2/n pic.twitter.com/iOjKr7eoYJ
— Brian Schaffner (@b_schaffner) August 23, 2017
Many might assume that these “Bernie-Trump voters” felt strongly about trade, since both candidate were against the Trans-Pacific Partnership. However, Schaffner found there wasn’t a particularly large discrepancy there between the Sanders supporters—regardless of who they voted for in the general election.
Instead, he said the data found race to be more divisive than trade decisions, showing that in general Bernie-Trump voters likely don’t think that white people have significant advantages in America. That could explain why they didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, who aimed many of her efforts toward addressing racial inequality.
So, who are these people? In an interview with Vox, Schaffner said these voters were “also older and whiter, and also less liberal.” A breakdown of the partisanship supports this theory, showing that even though they voted for Bernie Sanders initially, they didn’t all necessarily label themselves as Democrats.
The big question is whether or not these voters’ choices gave Trump the W. Based on some of the key deciding states in the general election, if these Bernie-Trump voters chose not to defect from the Democratic party, then yes, Clinton could have won—in theory.
However, also worth noting partisanship of these voters. This chart shows Bernie -> Trump voters are much less likely to be Dems 6/n pic.twitter.com/WuxF53hTeF
— Brian Schaffner (@b_schaffner) August 23, 2017
“The way to think about this is, as several people have noted, that this election was so close that any number of things could have proved the decisive difference,” Schaffner told Vox. “This is yet another one of those anythings.”
It’s important to remember that hypotheticals are just that: hypothetical. There’s no telling what unintended consequences any change would have had. It’s also worth noting that people changing political alignments between the primaries and general election isn’t really uncommon. NPR noted that in one 2008 study that about 25 percent of Clinton primary supporters voted John McCain in the general. So, maybe America isn’t as partisan as we thought (or perhaps just more fickle.)
It may be hard to see how anyone who “felt the Bern” could also want to “Make America Great Again” with Trump, but this election put a lot of people in a position they probably weren’t anticipating being in. We could look at statistics and surveys all day, but in the end it’s hard to say exactly why everyone voted the way they did.