The overwhelming majority of the voting data accumulated thus far in the Democratic primaries contradicts the media narrative suggesting Bernie Sanders doesn\u2019t perform well in states with diverse populations.<\/p>\n
While the fact that Sanders yesterday swept \u201cWestern Saturday\u201d (with votes in Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington) is a part of the analysis \u2014 as is the fact that, in just a few hours of voting, Sanders managed to eliminate 22.5% of Hillary Clinton\u2019s 296-delegate lead \u2014 it isn\u2019t the greater part. I\u2019m not even focusing here on the fact that, after weeks of being told how staggeringly far ahead Clinton is in the pledged delegate race, her monumental margin ends up, as of today, being no more than 54.9% to 45.1%.<\/p>\n
A single-digit lead.<\/p>\n
With 1,750 pledged delegates \u2014 nearly 45% of all pledged delegates<\/em> \u2014 yet to be awarded, across 22 future nominating contests.<\/p>\n So: those are some pretty eye-popping numbers.<\/p>\n Still, far more important to undercutting the specious media narrative about Bernie Sanders and diverse electorates is a somewhat broader observation: that thus far, six of the ten most diverse states in America<\/a> have held Democratic nominating contests, and both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have won three of these contests.<\/p>\n In two of her three wins in ultra-diverse states, Clinton won with relatively slim majorities: in Arizona she pulled 57.6% of the vote, and in Nevada, 52.6%.<\/p>\n In both states, Clinton substantially underperformed pre-election polling. The RCP<\/a> polling average in Arizona<\/a> predicted a 30-point victory; instead, Clinton won by 17.7%, and in fact she lost<\/em> the live (Election Day) voting to Sanders, 52% to 48%. Meanwhile, in Nevada<\/a>, Clinton met the expectations set by polls taken in the 120 hours before the caucuses, but fell dramatically short of the last poll taken prior to that period, which predicted a 23-point Clinton victory instead of the 5.5-point one she got. This enabled Sanders to claim, not unfairly, that he\u2019d made up more than 17 points on Clinton in the eight weeks leading up to the Silver State caucuses. The New York Times<\/em>, getting it right for once, called Clinton\u2019s Nevada win \u201cnarrow\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders won his three contests in ultra-diverse states \u2014 Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington \u2014 with 81.6%, 69.8%, and 72.7% shares of the vote, respectively.<\/p>\n In all three states, Sanders exceeded expectations dramatically. Polling website FiveThirtyEight.com had predicted<\/a> 8-point wins for Sanders in Hawaii and Alaska, and a more generous 17-point win in Washington.<\/p>\n Instead, Sanders won Alaska by 61.5 points, Hawaii by 39.8, and Washington \u2014 the largest of the three Western Saturday states \u2014 by a jaw-dropping 45.6 points.<\/p>\n (As a side note, Sanders also just won<\/a> the Democrats Abroad primary \u2014 which awards as many delegates as do Alaska, Vermont, or Wyoming \u2014 69% to 30%. While the demographic breakdown of Democrats Abroad voters is unknown, we do know that Sanders defeated Clinton in 167 of 170 countries \u2014 those last four words might be worth reading twice \u2014 and that in one of the three countries Clinton won, only five people voted. That means Sanders won among Democrats in every majority-nonwhite country in the world that has Democrats in it other than Nigeria, Singapore, and the Dominican Republic. As noted, only five people voted in Nigeria; in Singapore, Clinton\u2019s win was a relatively modest one, 58% to 42%. I won\u2019t list the 167 countries Sanders<\/em> won, as I just don\u2019t have the space here.)<\/p>\n If you thought these four decisive Sanders wins offered the national media a pretty good opportunity to drop its ridiculous narrative about Bernie Sanders supporters \u2014 namely, that nearly all of them are white \u2014 you either don\u2019t understand how firmly in the Clinton camp even mainstream media organizations are, or you don\u2019t pay any attention to domestic politics at all. Most of us knew what to expect from the media after seeing months of purportedly objective \u201cpanels\u201d on CNN and MSNBC comprised entirely of Clinton surrogates or neutral reporters; watching media outlets fail to cover even a single second of election-night speeches by Sanders; and cringing as every major media organization continued counting \u201csuper-delegates\u201d as though these were earned and confirmed \u201cvotes,\u201d despite a DNC directive<\/a> to not tally them until the summertime.<\/p>\n Most importantly, most of us knew what to expect after the national media had ignored entirely Sanders\u2019 strong performances in, demographically speaking, the \u201cmiddle half\u201d of U.S. states \u2014 that is, those states ranked<\/a> 13th through 38th in terms of their white population.<\/p>\n Sanders\u2019 record in these states is as follows (acknowledging exceedingly close results as ties):<\/p>\n The total delegate count for these seventeen \u201cnormative\u201d American states?<\/p>\n Clinton 643, Sanders 566.<\/p>\n 53.1% to 46.9%.<\/p>\n So we see here that Clinton has a very slight edge in states (1) and delegates (77), but not a dramatic one \u2014 especially given that in one of her \u201cwin\u201d states, North Carolina, live (Election Day) voting was essentially a tie. Meanwhile, all of Sanders\u2019 wins were by large margins.<\/p>\n When you add to the above seventeen states the six ultra-diverse ones referenced at the top of this article \u2014 plus the Democrats Abroad primary \u2014 the tally for Sanders looks like this:<\/p>\n The total delegate count for these twenty-one diverse American states?<\/p>\n Clinton 807, Sanders 749.<\/p>\n 51.8% to 48.2%.<\/p>\n Whereas none of the Sanders \u201cwins\u201d listed in this second chart were at all close, two of the wins Clinton banked were squeakers in one way or another: Nevada, because Clinton only won 52.7% to 47.2%; and North Carolina, because (again) Election Day voting there was a virtual tie.<\/p>\n So, is it really the case that all the voting in the nation\u2019s most diverse states (at least those that have voted thus far) comes down to Clinton beating Sanders \u2014 in delegates \u2014 just 51.8% to 48.2%?<\/p>\n Almost.<\/p>\n What the above analysis really does is underscore how complicated questions of race are in America.<\/p>\n For instance, the data assessment used at the head of this article to determine the ten most diverse states in America was one that considered mixed-race voters as \u201cnon-white.\u201d For this reason, it did not include Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, or Texas \u2014 states that would have appeared in the top ten if the question had simply been what percentage of each state\u2019s voters are Caucasian. But should that really be the measure we use to determine a state\u2019s demographic diversity? Certainly, it seems impermissibly reductive to blithely call mixed-race Americans \u201cCaucasian.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet most media assessments of racial and ethnic demographics do exactly that. For this reason, I\u2019ve used, in the middle of this article \u2014 the part with the bullet-pointed lists \u2014 a data assessment that ranks states solely by their Caucasian populations. This assessment offers no break-out for mixed-race Americans.<\/p>\n So if you consider mixed-race voters, as of course we should, Sanders and Clinton have indeed both won three of the ten most diverse states. And if you don\u2019t \u2014 that is, if you look instead at \u201cpercentage-white\u201d data only, as the national media habitually does \u2014 the seventeen American states that are the most \u201cnormative\u201d racially and ethnically indeed have voted just 53% to 47% in Clinton\u2019s favor.<\/p>\n So, somehow a 53%-47% delegate split in the seventeen most \u201cnormative\u201d American states (demographically speaking) and a 3-3 split among the six most diverse states that have voted so far adds up to a compelling narrative about Sanders\u2019 inability to attract nonwhite voters? That\u2019s a head-scratcher for sure.<\/p>\n If you think I\u2019m just having fun with numbers here, look at it this way: right now Clinton leads Sanders by 226 delegates, and 215 of that 226-delegate lead (over 95% of it) can be attributed to just four states, three of which are majority-white: Georgia (53% white), Florida (55% white), Mississippi (57% white).<\/p>\n Of these four states that account for almost the entirety of Clinton\u2019s lead on Sanders, only one of them \u2014 Florida \u2014 has any real chance of being won by the Democrats in the next four general elections.<\/p>\n In other words, reports of Sanders\u2019 irrelevance to the full swath of Democratic voters are not just exaggerated, but laughable.<\/p>\n Now, none of this is to say that Sanders performs just as well as Clinton among African-American voters, or Latino voters, though we can<\/em> note that Sanders has improved his performance among both groups as time has gone on and that \u2014 and this is perhaps the worst canard the media has perpetuated \u2014 the fact that Clinton performs well among these two voting groups does not mean that Sanders is unpopular<\/em> in these communities. Indeed, Sanders\u2019 favorability ratings wouldn\u2019t be 32 net points higher than Clinton\u2019s (+11 as compared to -21) if this were the case.<\/p>\n But what the above data do<\/em> tell us is that \u201cWestern Saturday\u201d was the time for the media to finally put to rest its outlandish claim that Bernie Sanders doesn\u2019t do well in states with diverse populations \u2014 as that<\/em> narrative, we can say for certain, is untrue.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, that sort of magnanimity from the corporate media just wasn\u2019t to be.<\/p>\n Amazingly, most Sanders supporters I\u2019ve spoken to, skeptical as they\u2019ve been about the media\u2019s coverage of the Sanders campaign, are still absolutely appalled at what unfolded after Sanders absolutely dominated Clinton on \u201cWestern Saturday\u201d \u2014 which was, again, if we let demographic statistics be our guide, the day on the spring election calendar in which the largest<\/em> number of racially and ethnically diverse populations got to weigh in on the Democratic primary race.<\/p>\n But you know what? They\u2019ve a right to be appalled, and even by the low standards set by news media coverage of the presidential election, it was<\/em> appalling.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s an abbreviated list of the shocking, indeed borderline racist political analyses heard on CNN during Western Saturday:<\/p>\n I\u2019m not including, in the list above, all the other absurd misstatements that CNN in particular filled the airwaves with \u2014 such as Bakari Sellers stating that Clinton\u2019s 13.8% win in Ohio (after polling had predicted a victory by more than 30 points) was as miraculous a performance as Sanders\u2019 come-from-behind win in Michigan or (moreover) his making up of almost the entirety of a 42-point deficit in Illinois in just the last seven days of that campaign.<\/p>\n So what explains all this journalistic malpractice?<\/p>\n The same thing that explains the absence of Sanders surrogates or supporters on cable TV. The same thing that explains media blackouts of Sanders speeches. The same thing that explains super-delegate tallies having been used by cable news all spring \u2014 successfully \u2014 to influence public perception of the Clinton-Sanders race, despite their use for this purpose having been explicitly opposed<\/a> by the Democratic National Committee. The same thing that explains Sanders having netted 21 delegates on \u201cWestern Tuesday\u201d (the votes in Arizona, Idaho, and Utah) rather than losing between one and ten net delegates \u2014 as predicted before the voting by the media \u2014 without anyone coming on air thereafter to issue a mea culpa or even a well-done to Sanders.<\/p>\n In short, the national media has a false narrative in its jaws like a dog with a bone and the only thing that will dislodge it is \u2014 apparently \u2014 Sanders not only winning the Democratic nomination for President but, also, each member of the media being allotted one Sanders voter apiece to pinch them mercilessly on the arm.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Via Common Dreams<\/a>.\u00a0This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The overwhelming majority of the voting data accumulated thus far in the Democratic primaries contradicts the media narrative suggesting Bernie Sanders doesn\u2019t perform well in states with diverse populations. While the fact that Sanders yesterday swept \u201cWestern Saturday\u201d (with votes in Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington) is a part of the analysis \u2014 as is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":234644,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-234501","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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