What Did — And Didn’t — Go Down In The Iowa Caucuses

Yeah, I think Sanders has had a pretty good few months, and certainly he has an opportunity to expand his coalition further … but, yeah it is worth remembering that he’s currently polling at only about half of the vote he got last time. To some extent, the story of the caucus is that no one came into tonight with more than about 20 percent support.

In my panel survey, there are 454 Democrats who reported their primary preference in 2016 and again last week. In 2016, 33 percent were with Bernie. He’s now got 15 percent of that group, and 64 percent of his supporters now were with him in 2016. It’s an obvious point, but Sanders will lose support from 2016 — the question is just how much.

In a multi-candidate race, Sanders just needs to consolidate support from caucusgoers who already supported him (as well as new younger caucusgoers). But most polls had him retaining a bit less than half of his prior supporters and converting almost no former Clinton supporters. So an electorate of 56% 2016 Clinton supporters and 31% 2016 Sanders supporters would require him to end with a larger share of former supporters than polls suggested. On the bright side for Sanders, Clinton-supporting caucusgoers have been distributed across four other candidates.