Recent Iowa polls show Sanders at about 15%, essentially in a three-person race for second place with Senator Elizabeth Warren and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. That’s for a candidate who won half the vote there in 2016.
And while Sanders is faring somewhat better nationally, that’s mainly because almost all the other candidates remain unknown to voters. Only about 8% of Democrats say they’re definitely supporting Sanders. In other words, it’s entirely plausible that Sanders could fail to reach the delegate threshold in Iowa, Nevada, and South Carolina. Even if he stayed in, he probably wouldn’t be much of a factor.
What happened to the 43% of the vote he received in primaries and caucuses in 2016? Only a fraction of those votes came from dedicated Sanders fans, that is, people who really thought he should be president. Some of those voters wanted to push the party in a more liberal direction. Some thought they could send Hillary Clinton a message. Some just disliked Clinton. In short, it was clear at the time that a lot of Sanders votes were protest votes, and everything so far in 2020 confirms that he simply doesn’t have that many dedicated supporters.
Just a thought.
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