Let’s discuss these numbers:
Obviously, you can see some things right away. Clinton is much stronger with the non-white vote. Everybody has been talking about that, but we can see some other stuff that might help explain it. For example, shouldn’t Sanders be doing better with people who make less than $40,000 a year? In theory, at least, shouldn’t he be doing better with people who have some or no college education, and therefore presumably lower take-home pay?
But then look at those religious attendance numbers. People who go to religious services are completely shunning Bernie Sanders. Is that because he’s Jewish? Is it because he doesn’t seem very religious regardless of his faith tradition? Is it mainly an artifact of other economic or regional factors?
What this shows, interestingly, is that the people most likely to benefit from the policies that Sanders is promoting (that Hillary is not) are also the people least likely to support Sanders. People at the lower end of the economic and education scale are Clinton’s base. As a statistical matter, these are also people of color.
But, remember, black and brown progressives are considerably more religious than white progressives. They also skew southern when they aren’t strictly urban.
So, it’s hard to decide if it’s hurting Sanders more that he’s a northerner from Vermont or that he’s Jewish and not visibly religious or that low-income low-education voters are not likely to understand the policy distinctions he has with Clinton that would favor them.
You can’t change who you are or where you’re from, but you can get your message out. So, the answers to these questions matter a lot for knowing if Sanders has room to grow.
