Democratic Primary polls 2020: Bernie Sanders isn’t Jeremy Corbyn, and might be the safest choice to beat Trump A popular candidate with a clear road to victory isn’t the same as the failure of Corbyn

Bernie Sanders is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president. A host of people in the UK and the US have been making dire warnings about not repeating the “mistakes of Labour” in electing Jeremy Corbyn before they collapsed to defeat in 2019. But this popular analysis elides the differences between the two countries.

The first reason is very straight-forward. Bernie Sanders is popular, and Jeremy Corbyn never was, aside from a few halcyon post-election weeks in 2017. It was one of the unavoidable facts behind Mr Corbyn’s poor performance. In 2017 he managed to close the favourability gap with Theresa May, and Labour denied the Tories a majority, but in 2019 he couldn’t repeat the trick, and the election ended in failure for the party.

He went into the 2019 election with a net approval of -47, which even now looks astonishing, but Bernie Sanders has a net approval of +10, above his current closest competitor, Joe Biden, at +3. The only Democrats more popular are Jimmy Carter (+37) and Barack Obama (+22), while Trump is at -12. By many other measures Mr Sanders’ popularity holds up. He has the highest approval ratings of any senator, Democrat or Republican, and 73 per cent favourability within the Democratic party, higher than any of his competitors for the nomination – though it’s tight.

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Many people assume politicians who are closer to the ideological edges will be more unpopular. Intuitively, that makes sense – they’ll alienate more people by only drawing favourability from one side, and the assumption is that most people place themselves somewhere in the centre. But in recent democratic elections, that hasn’t always seemed to apply.

No unity candidate

One of the main issues on Mr Sanders’ chances in the election has been that the moderate wing of the party will eventually coalesce around a single candidate, who can unite the centre and inherently be more electable. But voters just aren’t behaving like there is an electable centre candidate. Mr Biden, who came second in Nevada, was long seen as the leading moderate candidate. But his supporters are more likely to have Mr Sanders as their second choice than anyone else – if he drops out, the primary beneficiary is Sanders – not another moderate. A fifth of Mike Bloomberg supporters and a fifth of Pete Buttigieg supporters also back Mr Sanders as a second choice, despite huge gaps in what the candidates are proposing.

Ultimately, there’s no unity candidate as a result, because voters are far more happy to cross ideological lines than assumed, which bodes well for Mr Sanders in the general election. Voters like different candidates in complex and contradictory ways, which may go some way to explaining his strong theoretical performance against Trump. In a CBS/YouGov poll of 10,000 likely voters he fared better in head-to-head match-ups against Trump than any other candidate, all of whom are more moderate, as well as Elizabeth Warren whose ideology is much closer to his then that of the others.

That again seems counter-intuitive, but Mr Sanders has a relatively good record against Republicans.

He first won a congressional seat from a Republican incumbent 30 years ago, and since then his home state of Vermont has become increasingly Democratic. You would expect a candidate so ideologically distant from the nominee of his party to under-perform the top of the ticket, alienating moderate swing voters who’d move to a more acceptable Republican on other side in the senate race, but stick with the presidential nominee. He instead has a long history of out-performing the Democratic candidates in elections. In the 2012 senate election he got 71 per cent of the vote in his down-ballot race, while Obama, leading the ticket, got just 67 per cent from the same set of voters – though Mr Sanders was an incumbent. In a congressional race, back in 2000, he beat Al Gore’s numbers by a massive 17 points.

There are pretty big caveats to this strength. A recent study seems to have proven one risk that was implied by polling. A Sanders victory would in part rely on a higher turnout among the young and people of colour, while a smaller group of Democrats and Independents will be put off by him, staying home or flipping to Trump. That’s a real challenge, but this is part of the second key reason why candidate Sanders is not comparable to defeated Corbyn. This theory of change makes sense in the US in a way Mr Corbyn’s didn’t in the UK.

The election isn’t just a test of ideologies, it’s also a test of how to win an election. There are broadly two approaches, at least within electoral systems with first-past-the-post elements. Either you take the 1990s Blair/Clinton model, and win in the middle by capturing the bulk of ideologically centrist voters, or you bring in new voters to change the calculus – which is what the outsider Trump campaign did, in some states, in 2016. Occasionally, a generational candidate will emerge who can do both – Reagan, or FDR.

That’s the Sanders-Corbyn theory of change – turn out your voters, and enthuse new ones. By inspiring non-voters to go to the polls, the race becomes competitive without needing to convert your opponent’s voters, which can be a harder job. But a two-party system of generally more generationally homogenous state electorates is inherently more friendly to that theory than the UK’s 650 widely varied constituencies.

The range of median ages for US states is 13.8 years, from 30.5 to 44.3 – and the bottom three years of that is just Utah. In the UK, the range is more than twice that at 28.1, from 26.0 in Sheffield Central, to 54.1 in North Norfolk. Turning out under 40s is very helpful in some places in the UK, but mostly seats Labour (or the Lib Dems) already hold, while being close to meaningless in the ones Labour want to actually win. The minimal turnout bump of 30-40 year-olds in 2017 helped Corbyn, but not nearly enough. In the US, that sort of shift would be a much bigger deal in making the race close across a wider number of states.

Many people dismiss increasing turnout as essentially an unreasonable plan, including many that have managed winning election campaigns, but there’s actually very recent evidence for it. In Pennsylvania, the biggest state electorally that Mr Trump took off the Democrats, he won in part by bumping up his vote, and Hillary Clinton voters staying home. Even more recently, Democratic senate nominee Stacey Abrams says she increased turnout among people of colour by 40 per cent, and among young people by 138 per cent, in an election that saw young voters turn out like never before, though she still lost a uncommonly tight race.

Turning out non-voters is possible, especially when the centre seems to have retreated under intense partisanship – partisanship that Mr Sanders, as an Independent running as a Democrat, may be able to short-circuit. It is worth noting, however, that in the first three state contests, turnout hasn’t massively changed from previous years, though it’s closer to the high of 2008 than the low of 2016. The Bernie Sanders coalition was helped to grow with the support of young Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Photo: Getty)

Sun belt and rust belt

Mr Sanders has more viable routes to winning against the incumbent Trump as a result. There are two paths to getting the 270 electoral college votes for a Democrat in 2020. The first is the Rust Belt, winning back Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by appealing to white working class voters that backed Trump in 2016. The second is the Sun Belt, winning Arizona, Georgia, Florida and (whisper it) Texas, by appealing to a diverse coalition, particularly Hispanic voters, and bringing out young voters.

Each candidate has some states in that group where they’re stronger – Bloomberg is good for Florida, Biden good for Pennsylvania, and Klobuchar good for Wisconsin. But the Sanders campaign consistently wins among Hispanic voters, is strong with working class voters, and has a colossal lead among the young, with the upshot that in every key swing state, not just the national race, he consistently ties or leads the other Democratic candidates in match-ups against Trump. Other candidates could absolutely win overall, but Sanders has the best chance in the most swing states. He could take either path, both paths, or a combination of the two. Wisconsin is looking hard back to win for any candidate – but taking Arizona instead would get Sanders over the line, while it’s less likely to flip for other Democrats.

Mr Corbyn, comparatively, faced demographic challenges that meant the number of seats he could flip were small. There weren’t enough seats with a big proportion of renters, of people of colour, of young people to flip. The one Labour gain on election night in 2019 was Putney, which was younger, less white and had fewer owner-occupiers – there just weren’t many more seats like that. Linked to that, Mr Corbyn lost white working class voters, and so the infamous ‘red wall’ seats fell. Mr Sanders seems roughly as likely to be able to hold them as any other candidate, though Mr Trump still outpolls him by some way among them.

So there’s an opportunity that Sanders has that Corbyn didn’t – partly because he’s a stronger candidate, and partly because the path to a victory makes sense.

Sanders win isn’t locked in – or even likely

That doesn’t mean Sanders will win. In fact, it’s probably still unlikely any Democrat will, Sanders just has the best chance. The most consistent measures of who will win a presidential election against an incumbent are macro-economic performance, and overall approval ratings. Both are good for Trump. Unemployment is low, and GDP growth is stable if not explosive – though coronavirus presents a very real threat to that. His approval rating isn’t positive, but it’s maintained a very consistent level for almost his entire term, suggesting a very high floor in support – it’s even recently begun to tick up. Now it’s just a few points lower than Obama’s in 2012, and he won by 5 million votes.

There’s a very valid argument that another candidate could theoretically be better placed to beat Trump, but none of this group seems to be. They all have weaknesses in their coalition far more significant than Sanders, and the other option – a contested convention and an outsider candidate – is extremely risky. In fact, it hasn’t worked in over a century.