What Went Down In Michigan, Washington And Other Democratic Primaries
Yeah, I’m on the page as Geoffrey regarding reading too much into primaries. Even impressive turnouts, like Nevada where nearly 75,000 Democrats turned out to caucus, that’s still such a small fraction: Nevada has 610,000 active registered Democrats.
You heard arguments from Sanders supporters in 2016 after Clinton lost the general that were along the lines of “Sanders won those Midwest states in the primary. He could have won them in the general.” As Micah said, we don’t exactly buy that argument, but there has to be something to having the base of the party excited about you. Like if Sanders won this primary, you’d have to think he would do worse in Mississippi against Trump than Biden would have done. Does that make any sense?
Could What Happened With Michigan Polls In 2016 Happen Again?
Biden has a 99 percent chance of winning Michigan, according to our forecast, and leads Sanders by 23.4 points in the polls. If you have a sense of déjà vu, you’re not alone. Sanders trails Biden by roughly the same margin he trailed Hillary Clinton in 2016. We know how that turned out: In a surprising upset, Sanders went on to win Michigan by 1.4 points.
It was one of the biggest polling misses ever. The misfire resulted from a series of underestimations, including miscalculating turnout and support for Sanders among young voters, independent voters’ participation and Sanders’s support among black voters. One complicating problem for pollsters then, too, was they lacked recent data for modeling the primary electorate. Michigan held a primary in 2008, but it wasn’t sanctioned because of rules violations, and Barack Obama didn’t contest it. This means the last meaningful primary before 2016 happened all the way back in 1992! (The 2000 and 2004 contests were caucuses.)
So could lightning strike twice for Sanders?
Never say never, but we’re skeptical. Polling misses on this scale rarely happen, and moreover, it’s not clear that working-class white voters are a strength for Sanders this year as they were in 2016. Instead, as Nate Cohn of The New York Times’s The Upshot points out, they might be more of a strength for Biden.
Fool us once, Michigan polls, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us.