Sanders gained more votes than Hillary Clinton in key general election states. But voting behavior in the primaries is very different to voting on the big day

It has been a week since Donald Trump won the majority of electoral college votes and became president-elect of the US (and a week since he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton). It has been a week of endless questions and limited answers – how? why? And, perhaps most important of all: what now?

More specifically, some have wondered whether Donald Trump would have been defeated if he had faced a different Democratic candidate: Bernie Sanders. On Wednesday, CNN journalist Wolf Blitzer asked Jane Sanders, wife of the former candidate for the Democratic nomination, if her husband would have had a better chance of beating Trump than Clinton. “Absolutely,” she replied, “but it doesn’t matter now.”

There’s mixed evidence for that certainty.

In the primaries, Sanders gained more votes than Clinton in Wisconsin and Michigan. Those are important states. Wisconsin, a formerly Democratic state, was narrowly won by Trump in the presidential election on Tuesday. In Michigan, the race was even closer, with Trump winning by just 11,837 votes (which represents 0.25% of all votes cast there). If Clinton had won just 109,000 more votes in those states (plus Pennsylvania where she also narrowly lost), we would be calling her, and not Trump, president-elect.

But that is a big “if” for a number of reasons. Perhaps Sanders would have won Wisconsin and Michigan but lost Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota and New Hampshire – states that were only narrowly won by the Democratic party in the presidential election. It’s true that Sanders won all of those states except Nevada in the primary season but there’s a much larger caveat here: voting behavior in the primaries is different to voting behavior in the presidential election.

If we can’t rely on primary vote counts to gauge Sanders chances, we’re not left with much else besides polling – a deeply flawed analytical tool. Nevertheless, it’s understandable why one of those polls is now being widely circulated. It found that in a race between Sanders and Trump, Sanders would have won with 56% of the vote. The national poll, which spoke to 1,600 registered voters two days before the general election was conducted by Gravis Marketing.

Even more than most polls, that one is deeply flawed because it asks individuals to consider an alternate reality where Sanders was a nominee. Considering completely hypothetical and consequence-free choices encourages some unrealistic answers in surveys – otherwise 27% of US adults would waterboard someone suspected of terrorism.

Slightly better then is polling which regularly asks a far less hypothetical question: “Do you have a favorable opinion of candidate X?”. The answers to that question are crucial in understanding why 2016 was no ordinary election year: Clinton and Trump were two of the most unpopular candidates US voters have ever been told to choose between. That dislike seemed to endure right up to the end of election season.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump’s (lack of) favorability. Photograph: Huffington Post

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hillary Clinton’s (lack of) favorability. Photograph: Huffington Post

The story for Bernie Sanders though looks very different (the strength of that feeling might explain why, in Vermont, Sanders’ home state and one he has served as Senator since 2007, 18,183 voters decided to write his name into their ballot as their presidential choice):

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bernie Sanders’ favorability. Photograph: Huffington Post

More accurate perhaps is polling that asks about broader attitudes rather than people (if we had more such polling in the lead up to the election, perhaps the campaigns would have been more focused on policies).

One such attitude seems important in this election: trust in government is at a historic low according to research by Pew Research Center and 81% of likely voters said that federal government was corrupt according to a survey by Rasmussen Reports in February. (It should be noted that trust in mass media is at a historic low too).



Although Bernie Sanders has 34 years of political experience under his belt and Donald Trump has zero years, both candidates campaigned as outsiders and used anti-corruption rhetoric regularly in their speeches. That’s potentially important for votes because more Americans identify as Independent today than at any time in the last few decades. In 2015, Gallup found 42% of US adults said they were independent, compared to 29% who said they were Democrat and 26% who said they were Republican.

There is one major drawback to all of these numbers though: they were collected before Donald Trump won a US presidential election – in the face of even the most trusted predictions. Everything is different now, and if Sanders were to test the numbers by competing against Trump in 2020, he will probably be doing so in a very different set of circumstances.

• This article was amended on 16 November 2016. An earlier version said Sanders had won several named states in the primary season except Colorado. He won those states except Nevada. In addition, the question put to Jane Sanders by Wolf Blitzer was clarified.