2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: 12.8%. That's the margin Hillary won CA by. Remember those suspect polls that were [View all]Corporate666
(587 posts)I would like to see a scientific study of what such announcements do to turnout. I am sure it's down, but my gut feel would be that Hillary would be harmed more than Sanders by the announcement.
You'll get a lot of HRC voters thinking "meh, no need to go now that she's won" but the Sanders voters knew it was a long shot all along, so and they know she wasn't going to get 2026 delegates without CA, so I imagine they would still turn out big time for Bernie. Not to mention the protest vote... like "screw her! Let's get out there and give her a beating".
I could be wrong and I am not aware of any peer reviewed studies on this, but my gut feel is that the announcement hurt HRC way more than BS. And even if it hurt both of them, it doesn't explain the poll discrepancy.
I think it's much simpler... there are so many demographic groups and nobody can know who will come out to vote and for whom, so anything they do is just estimates. That's why there were poll numbers all over the place in weeks leading up to CA. When a poll comes out showing BS ahead by 5 and one the week before showed HRC up by 10... it's not that he gained 15 points on her. It's that none of these polls are anything close to perfect.