2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Why is it that Bernie won the conservative counties in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut [View all]pnwmom
(108,977 posts)populations.
Washington is less than 5% African American. Our caucus system increased Bernie's lead even more, since it involved only about 6% of our population.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-is-winning-the-states-that-look-like-the-democratic-party/
And the sort of wishful thinking Sanders is engaged in can cut both ways. Yes, Clintons lead would be considerably narrower (although shed still be winning) without delegates from the Deep South. But what if you excluded delegates from caucuses, where Sanders has gained a net of 150 delegates on Clinton? Without those delegates, Sanders couldnt even maintain the pretense of a competitive race. Not only are most of those caucus states extremely white and therefore poorly representative of Democrats national demographics many of them (such as Idaho and Nebraska) are also quite red. Furthermore, caucuses tend to disenfranchise voters by making it harder to vote. Our demographic modeling suggests that this has hurt Clinton and that Sanders wouldnt have won by the same enormous margins if those caucus states had held primaries instead.
But overall, the math is pretty simple. Sanders is winning states that are much whiter than the Democratic electorate as a whole, Clinton is winning states that are much blacker than the Democratic electorate as a whole, and Clinton is winning most of those states that are somewhere in the middle, whether theyre in the South (like Virginia) or elsewhere (like Ohio or Nevada). Thats why shell probably be the Democratic nominee.