Here’s a nice dive into the data on people who voted for Sanders in the Democratic primary, yet Trump in the general election. People on the internet have been drawing two conclusions, neither of which seem supported to me. The first is “Bernie Woulda Won,” and the second is “BernieBro snowflakes gave us Trump.”

With regards to the first, the raw numbers do suggest that if almost everyone who voted for Sanders in the primary had voted for him in the general, and if Sanders managed to hold onto virtually the entirety of the Clinton primary voters, then he could have beaten Trump in the three Midwestern states that allowed Trump to win the election. It should be obvious, however, that neither of these conditions can be assumed. In the first place, the demographic characteristics of Sanders-Trump voters does not suggest that they would have been easy for Bernie to hold onto; they look more like Republicans than most of the rest of the Democratic coalition. They may have voted for Bernie for a wide variety of reasons (culture war, misogyny, racism, anti-neoliberalism, anti-trade, spoilers, whatever), but for idiosyncratic historical reasons the Democratic Party is chock full of people who nearly always vote Republican in general elections (Kentucky Democrats, for example, still have a huge advantage in registration, which is worth almost nothing in the general). Second, the historical norm for defections from a defeated Presidential primary contest seems to be somewhat higher than the 12% that went Sanders-Trump; 25% of Clinton voters defected in 2008, and the combined numbers for GOP losers last year amount to somewhat more than 12% (3% for Cruz, 10% for Rubio, 32% for Kasich). Thus, unless Clinton voters defected from Sanders at historically low levels, it’s not obvious that Bernie could have won those states.

Indeed, just a quick look at these numbers suggest that the ideological model of voter behavior does reasonably well to explain defections from defeated primary candidates. Given their placement on the ideological spectrum, the Cruz-Rubio-Kasich numbers are pretty much what you would expect; more moderate voters were more willing to cross the line. The Clinton 2008 numbers also accord pretty well with how the Obama and Clinton coalitions fell out in 2008; although the candidates were almost ideologically indistinguishable, Clinton assembled a more centrist coalition that was more likely to defect to the GOP. Given that Clinton again had the more centrist coalition in 2016, it seems likely that Sanders would have bled even more Democratic primary voters than Clinton. The core argument for “Bernie would have won,” thus has to rest not on Sanders-Trump voters, but on Sanders-Stein/Johnson/Non-voter. The reports analyzed at Monkey Cage have some data on this, but it’s hard to draw conclusions without a stronger sense of how Clinton voters would have behaved in this alternative reality.

On the second argument, the data don’t seem to support the “BernieBros gave us Trump” argument. The folks who went Sanders-Trump don’t look like most of the rest of the Democratic coalition; they skew old, they skew racist, and a majority of them voted against Obama. These are not the people you spend all day arguing against on twitter, and it may well have been difficult even for Sanders to reach them. And again, you have to expect defections from pretty much every candidate (the drawn-out Democratic party primary process probably exacerbates this, but that’s an argument for another day), and the Sanders-Trump group doesn’t seem large by historical standards.

Still, some very interesting stuff.