r/Enough_Sanders_Spam • u/semaphore-1842 Corporate Democratic Working Girl 👮♀️ • Feb 25 '19
A comparison of Bernie 2016 and Clinton 2008 supporters: or, why the "25% Clinton-McCain" copypasta is a big fat lie
Don't know if its just me, but I feel like Chapobots and Berners have been running around spamming "25% of Clinton supporters voted for McCain - Bernie supporters are more reliable!" lie all over Reddit lately. Well frankly I'm sick of the bullshit, and here's why:
1. Opinion polls are NOT evidence that 25% of Hillary supporters defected to McCain.
There are only two sources for the 25% Hillary/McCain defection number. The first is opinion polls from during the primary, which are meaningless for obvious reasons.
But if we were to take these numbers seriously (and again, don't, because they are literally useless), Bernie supporters would have no legs to stand on. In fact (although The Guardian's article put some truly insane spin on it), opinion polls from a comparable point in 2016 finds that only 7% out of 18% of respondents who were Bernie supporters said they would vote for Hillary in the general election. That's less than 39%, whereas 62% of Hillary supporters said they were willing to vote for Obama 2008 primary polls.
But again, primary opinion polls are meaningless, so let's move on.
2. There is still ZERO evidence that 25% of Hillary's primary voters voted for McCain.
The second source is a study published in Public Opinion Quarterly, titled "'Sour Grapes' or Rational Voting?", specifically this particular table: https://i.imgur.com/fiCeesG.png. The authors analysed the self-reported votes of 1,837 respondents, finding that of the 15% (~275) who reported voting for Clinton in the primary, 25% (~69) claims to then have voted for McCain in the general election.
Sounds damning? Except... it's all bullcrap. See for yourself by adding up the votes for Obama and McCain: 0.76 * 30 + 0.11 * 21 + 0.33* 49 vs 0.19 * 30 + 0.86 * 21 + 0.37 * 49 => 41.28% vs 41.89%. Of course, in our timeline, instead of losing by 0.61%, Obama became president in a 7.1% (52.9 to 45.7) landslide. Further red flags: Studies typically find only 2% of primary voters vote against their own candidate. Yet, in this table only 87% of Obama's primary voters reported voting for him in the general, and for McCain it's even lower, 84%.
So why is this apparently the worst poll since The Literary Digest called the election for President Alfred Landon in 1936? Simple: because it is the unweighted results of a panel survey.
Normally, opinion polls try to produce representative results by getting a certain number of responses from different demographics and modelling the population. If they don't get enough responses, they keep trying until they do. In contrast, with a panel survey, a fixed cohort of panel members are selected at the start and just keeps getting re-interviewed throughout the rest of the year. Inevitably, response rates drop off a cliff. Hence, it is conventional wisdom that panel surveys are good for showing trends of the self-reporting cohort, but useless as an prediction of the absolute numbers. This gets even worse when you try to get a subgroup of a subgroup, as the author were doing in creating this table. All 69 Hillary-McCain voter it found could just be from West Virginia, for all we know.
It makes zero sense to believe that the 25% number is accurate, when we know for fact that nearly every other number on that table is off by double digits.
3. In fact, exit polls say 84% of Hillary supporters voted for Obama
Thanks to the media attention PUMAs attracted, one of the questions asked in the 2008 exit polls were who the voters supported in the primary. These are the only concrete numbers we have on the Clinton-McCain defectors. And it shows that of the voters who supported Hillary during the primary, 84% voted for Obama and 15% voted for McCain.
Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/04/exit.polls/
I'll be the first to admit that wasn't ideal (ratfucking by Rush Limbaugh aside, there's clearly a fair bit of racism in play). However,
4. Only 74.3% of Bernie's primary voters voted for Hillary.
The spammers usually either ignore the Bernie defectors completely, or point out that "only" 12% voted for Trump. I mean, for starters, McCain was a way better candidate than Trump. Literally anyone is. More importantly, however, this is a lie by omission, because another 13.7% voted third party or wrote in Harambe, or stayed home altogether.
Here is a table of the results, as prepared by 538. As you can see, at least 24% of Bernie's primary voters voted against Hillary in the general election. And I'm sure you all remember this, but enough of them voted for Jill Stein to throw the election in MI, PA, and WI.
The source for these numbers is the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, which used actually confirmed voter records (as opposed to self-reported votes) of some 64,600 voters. When one of the authors, Brian Schaffner, shared the preliminary results on Twitter, he noted that the sample size of confirmed Bernie primary/general voters was 4,226. That is fifteen times larger than the "Sour Grapes" study had for Hillary voters.
TL;DR - the "25% of Hillary supporters voted for McCain" claim is projection from the far left.
edited to fix stats in the first section
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u/the-city-moved-to-me Feb 25 '19 edited Feb 25 '19
To add to this, voting '08 Clinton --> '08 McCain is not even remotely comparable to voting Bernie --> Trump in the first place.
In 2008, McCain still was kind of a 'sane' and 'moderate' republican and was widely known as a "Maverick". So even though I disagreed with it, going from 2008 Clinton to 2008 McCain was an entirely reasonable thing for a 2008 moderate to do.
Going from Bernie Sanders to DONALD FUCKING TRUMP in 2016, on the other hand, was a nonsensical and batshit insane thing done purely out of cynical spitefulness and privileged nihilism.
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u/itshurleytime Feb 25 '19
More than an incidental number of the Bernie fans I know personally thought Clinton was absolutely evil and bought into the horns growing out of her head vision of her. I had to get an early start on the Facebook 'snooze friend' function because once Bernie announced, they have gone from normally reasonable adults to strongly attacking Dems from the left because they aren't pure like Bernie.
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u/CorbinGDawg69 Feb 25 '19
And furthermore, if you reduce political opinion to a line, there are places you could be on that line where 2008 Clinton > John McCain > Obama. Bernie to Trump voters are just people with no real ideology or butthurt.
Though tbf the hosts of Chapo have repeatedly said that Bernie-> Trump voters are idiots, so I think it's a different brand of Bernout that supports that.
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u/semaphore-1842 Corporate Democratic Working Girl 👮♀️ Feb 25 '19 edited Feb 25 '19
Yeah they would have to be absolutely phenomenal nutjobs to still pretend Trump was a viable leftist choice. But tons of Chapofratbros are still handwaving Bernie->Trump votes away as a "myth" or deflecting with whataboutism. This is mainly trying to debunk the latter.
Although frankly I consider anything other than a vote for Hillary a tacit half vote for Trump at best. He was a historically awful person and even worse presidential candidate. I thought everyone sane had a civic responsibility to actively reject him, the way France rejected Le Pen by a 30% landslide.
Sadly, apparently not.
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u/Kalel2319 Feb 25 '19
I really believed that Trump had zero chance, that the American public was no way going to elect someone so unfit. I remember election night thinking, Christ I thought we were better than this.
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u/Mrs_Frisby Mar 05 '19
I was hopeful but prepared.
The abuse of Clinton supporters was a real tell. That it came from the left and it was so laced with sexist fury. If it just came from the right it was fine, those are voters we'd never have had anyway. But I'd been reading the filth in Sander's campaign mailers and knew that millions of people trusted every lie that came from his lips.
The worst one flat out accused Clinton of seeking to poison children for money from frackers. Not from Weaver, from Sanders himself. She could take on Russia, she could overcome Comey, but the backstabbing from Bernie was the last straw.
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u/gsloane Feb 25 '19
I have been pointing to the Duke study, which I believe is the "sour grapes" one. If you read the study it also finds that 9 percent of Obama supporters in the primary voted McCain. And it found that the political beliefs of the 25 percent of the Hillary voters were simply conservative. They were not likely voting Hillary in the general either. They were not bitter Hillary voters or PUMAs.
The bernholes fail over and over again in the comparisons. First, there is no comparison voting Trump or not doing all you can to stop him versus any other election. The dynamic is just not comparable. There are so few disparate polls and studies between the two elections that one poll from each will not give you some definitive answer. So claiming "more supported Hillary than the other!" is just a lie on its face, there is no way they could have that certainty. Also, the numbers that there are do not support the claim to begin with. So if you could compare and the data was solid, it doesn't support them. And the most obvious evidence is the public behavior of the candidates and their supporters at the most important moments in the campaign. At the convention and in the final weeks, you see a public face that is all to obvious of how the two differed and which lent more support to the nominee. So in numbers and in deed they are just lying about what went down and trying to spin a few out of context data points as some definitive proof against what your eyes could tell you is not true. And they do this with everything, so it's not new or out of the ordinary behavior from them with how they treat facts and reality.
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u/semaphore-1842 Corporate Democratic Working Girl 👮♀️ Feb 25 '19
If you read the study it also finds that 9 percent of Obama supporters in the primary voted McCain.
Yup, that's the same study. It's even worse if you look at Obama-Obama numbers like I did in the post, which was only 87%. That's absurd (the CCSE study found 2% defection for both Trump and Clinton in 2016) . Which is why,
And it found that the political beliefs of the 25 percent of the Hillary voters were simply conservative.
It may well be why some Hillary voters defected to McCain, but there is simply no reason to believe this number is remotely accurate. The Sour Grapes study is basically only good for analyzing trends of how voters came home to Obama; the absolute percentages were simply way off.
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u/AlexandrianVagabond Feb 25 '19
Should note tho that the Duke study itself points out that the results of its panel are wildly divergent from exit polls (which showed Clinton to McCain voters at 12%), and they really don't have a good explanation for the discrepancy.
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u/AlexandrianVagabond Feb 25 '19
Thank you. I saved this for future use.
I honestly think that the 25% figure started getting thrown around online because that was, in actuality, the correct number for those Sanders voters who didn't vote for HRC. It'a always projection with these guys.
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u/FormerDittoHead Feb 25 '19
The ONLY "rubber" number that's in question is how many Republicans voted for the "spoiler" in open primaries. Funny how Bernie wants open primaries so much (so Republicans can vote for him, believing he will lose).
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Feb 25 '19
Thanks for doing this!
Any time a Bernout breaks out this stat (which is like every fucking conversation with every one) I fall back on voting for McCain was nothing like voting for Trump.
McCain was a patriot and competent at government.
Trump was an abomination with shit character and NO government experience. He flaunted his worthlessness in our faces.
Going from Hillary to McCain was not great but going from Bernie to Trump was deranged, dangerous and completely irresponsible. No comparison in my mind.
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Feb 26 '19 edited Dec 19 '19
[deleted]
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Feb 26 '19
A modern Republican presidential candidate who was not a threat to democracy. As horrible as the typical Republican is and was, Trump was still way worse.
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Feb 26 '19
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Feb 26 '19
Oh FFS. Where the fuck did I say McCain was some great dude?
The only thing you're accused of is missing my point, but you're not alone in that regard so congrats.
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u/HitomeM Feb 25 '19
Thank you for this. This came up so frequently in the Sanders announcement megathread on r/politics that I was banned for continually shooting it down.
They claimed it was spam...in a megathread. With people continually bringing up a false talking point. I can almost guarantee it was both a concentrated effort by a brigade using mass report coupled with a few Bernie-friendly mods like Qu1nlan.
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Feb 25 '19
This one is right up there of bullshit statistic claims with "black people love Bernie because a poll that says just young black voters exist and my black friend likes him."
Like it's also just easy to forget that 2016 was an election with a difference in popular vote by literally millions.
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u/devries Feb 26 '19
Don't forget:
"Brazile: I found 'no evidence' Democratic primary was rigged"
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/05/donna-brazile-rigged-democrats-clinton-sanders-244566
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u/ABgraphics Feb 25 '19
The source the cite usually is the poll taken right after the primary. This poll done a few weeks before election day shows only 11% of Clinton supporters not voting for Obama.
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u/noodles0311 liberal, but not progressive or paternalistic Feb 25 '19
I think we are missing a few key points here:
John McCain was an acceptable option as POTUS. Trump is a raving lunatic.
Clinton actually did get more votes in the primary than Obama, who won through chicanery. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
And STILL we voted for Obama in the general.
To me, Clinton was the best candidate in 08. I thought it was totally unfair to use the Iraq vote as a cudgel, because most Democrats voted for it and it's unfair to use consequentialism as a standard when none of these people are clairvoyant. They could only use the information presented to them and try and make the best decision they can. Obama was a state senator. He didn't have to vote.
So Clinton voters had to reconcile ourselves to Obama after being rightly upset at a primary that actually was undemocratic because of superdelegates, unlike the Berniebros fantasy in 2016. I thought Obama wasn't as moderate as I would like and so did a lot of Clinton voters. To be fair, McCain helped us make the decision by erratically suspending his campaign in September and picking a VP who was totally unprepared and unqualified for the office. In the end, basically everyone voted for Obama and after he got elected, he moved way back towards the middle and forgot a lot of his more extreme campaign promises.
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u/BourneAwayByWaves Establishment Feb 25 '19
Whoa now.... Obama was leading in bound delegates also. This was a primary where the DNC bound delegate distribution led Obama to be winning delegates but losing popular vote. The superdelegates could have either upheld the delegate outcome (which they did) or could have overrode it and went with the popular vote.
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Feb 25 '19
Clinton actually did get more votes in the primary than Obama, who won through chicanery
This is an extremely misleading, borderline disingenuous claim.
Clinton got more votes than Obama if you include the two primaries which violated DNC rules and were disqualified from counting. Obama removed his name from the Michigan ballot out of respect for the DNC, which Clinton did not do - so saying "but if you include the invalid primary where Obamas name wasn't an option, Clinton won more votes" is a pretty silly point.
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Aug 17 '19 edited Sep 15 '19
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u/semaphore-1842 Corporate Democratic Working Girl 👮♀️ Aug 17 '19
I think I either misread the article or linked the wrong poll. It's been 6 months so frankly I don't remember what I was doing.
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u/[deleted] Feb 25 '19
Oh my god thank you so much for destroying the most annoying smug talking point they have.
Also should be noted that the difference between Stein’s 2012 and 2016 vote totals in WI, MI and PA are larger than Trump’s margin of victory in those states and those voters had to come from somewhere.