The implications of each of these claims deserve scrutiny. Is the South really the most conservative part of the country? At least for the purposes of the Democratic primary––which is the race at hand––that claim is not clearly true. In the southern states of South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and Texas, between 20 to 27 percent of Democratic primary voters in exit polls identified as “very liberal,” with a range of 54 to 59 percent identifying as liberal in total. This profile does not look much different than the major––and decidedly non-southern––states of Ohio and Michigan, where 22 and 23 percent of Democratic voters were “very liberal” and 59 and 57 percent identified as liberal. Polls in New York suggest that about 24 percent of likely Democratic primary voters are “very liberal.” A recent poll in the great liberal bastion of California suggests similar numbers to New York, with about a quarter of Democratic voters aligning as very liberal and around 60 percent identifying as liberal.

The pre-election polls and exit polls in the ten largest states, which make up over half of the population of the United States, just don’t show a great deal of variance in the amount of liberal or very liberal voters among Democrats. Although more liberal voters do tend to gravitate towards Sanders and although some of Sanders’s wins have come from especially liberal Democratic electorates, including those in Vermont and Wisconsin, the fact of the matter is that the party that he is running to lead largely identifies as either somewhat liberal or moderate. The South hasn’t been much different.

A slightly altered version of this argument has been served up by some surrogates: that the Deep South is a lost cause for a Democrat in the general election. The relevance of this formulation in a primary election is unclear, save for some vague conceptualizations about electability, but an implicit disregard for the South in the primaries undermines Sanders’s pro-democracy arguments about superdelegates and campaign finance. Although it is very unlikely that the region will flip for Clinton or Sanders in the general election, the South might actually lean Democratic by affiliation, and President Obama’s landmark campaign in 2008 has demonstrated that the region can be made competitive and possibly opened up to a Democratic candidate.

Even if red states remain firmly red, primary elections function as a key lever for voters with little chance of impacting their states’ electoral votes to actually have some say in the race. This concern is especially salient now that several southern states have moved to make voting harder in ways that most impact people of color and the poor. How does Sanders, who envisions his political revolution as a broad coalition of marginalized people, account for his own inability to connect with and listen to marginalized southern voters?