Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign has begun. A new Gallup report shows how he could win — and why he might not.
A few hours before Bernie Sanders announced he was officially running for president on Tuesday morning, Gallup released a report on the state of public opinion inside the party — one with clear relevance for Bernie’s 2020 effort.
The report examines how the Democratic party has changed over the past 18 years, and finds the party’s voters are becoming increasingly left-wing. That helps explain not only Sanders’s then-surprising success in 2016, but why he’s (correctly) seen as one of the frontrunners today.
But it’s not all good news for the Vermont senator. In 2016, Sanders’s Achilles heel was black voters and older Democrats. The Gallup report finds that these are not incidental weaknesses: Older voters and nonwhite voters are two of the most conservative subgroups inside the Democratic party. This creates an intrinsic barrier for Sanders, the most left-identified candidate in the race, making it vital that he hold on to his core supporters in a field that has several other left-wing candidates.
Now, the Gallup analysis was limited in what it can tell us about Sanders’s chances. Its polls didn’t ask questions about key issues like police violence and immigration; more fundamentally, policy and ideology are far from the only factors that shape the way Democratic primary voters vote.
But new data helps us understand the basic lay of the land — and the barriers Sanders needs to surmount if he wants to win.
Gallup’s pollsters looked through data on the Democratic party since 2000, dividing it into three distinct periods: 2001-2006, when a growing number of Democrats were identifying as liberal; 2007-2012, when the share of Democrats who described themselves as liberal was steady, and 2013-2018, when it once again began to increase.
Overall, this has led to a major shift in party ideology. In recent years, for the first time in Gallup’s polling, more Democrats have self-identified as “liberal” than “moderate” or “conservative”:
This isn’t just a semantic difference. Gallup’s data finds that on a range of policies, from guns to taxes to climate change, Democratic voters have in fact moved increasingly to the left. This is particularly true among self-identified liberals, but moderate Democrats and even self-identified conservatives have moved left on several key issues.
Over the course of the past several decades, the two major political parties have become more ideologically unified, with Republican increasingly equivalent to “conservative” and Democrat increasingly equivalent to “liberal.
