Is Bernie Bringing A Surge Of New Voters? (NO)

Bernie Sanders claims to be able to bring a massive surge of new voters to the Democratic cause. He said his candidacy would do that in 2016, and he is repeating that same claim this year. There is only one problem with his claim -- it is NOT happening.

Philip Bump in The Washington Post has examined the turnout for Bernie Sanders. Here is part of what he has found:

“We need to have the largest voter turnout in the history of the United States,” continued Sanders (I-Vt.). “We need to bring working people back into the Democratic Party. We need to get young people voting in a way they have never done before. That is what our campaign is about.”

This has been Sanders’s sales pitch since 2016: His candidacy is the one that will prompt a surge of turnout, an electoral revolution that will sweep across the country, carrying him to the White House and progressive candidates to Capitol Hill. Sanders said it in that debate: Spurring turnout is what his campaign is about.

That rhetoric is potent, and it’s clearly the case that the Democratic Party’s nominee will need to do better at turnout than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. (More than 4 million voters who backed President Barack Obama in 2012 stayed home four years ago.) In the four states that have voted in 2020, though, Sanders is not exactly demonstrating that he can spur a surge in turnout.

In all four states, he has earned a smaller share of the vote than he did four years ago. There are three states in which we can compare actual vote totals with 2016. In two, received fewer votes than he did then. In the other, he saw a small increase in votes — but the vote total in the state grew four times as large.

Walking through those states quickly:

• In Iowa, Sanders earned about 26,000 fewer votes than he did in 2016, though overall turnout in the state increased over that year. (The size of that increase isn’t clear. The state party says that 171,000 people caucused in 2016, meaning a 3 percent increase this year, though actual tallies have the number of votes substantially lower. State turnout increased, but it’s not clear how much.)
• In New Hampshire, Sanders got nearly 76,000 fewer votesthan in 2016.
• There aren’t good numbers for the raw vote in Nevada from 2016. (It, like Iowa, holds caucuses, not a primary.) Sanders’s support in the state dropped 13 percentage points between the two elections.
• In South Carolina, Sanders added more than 10,000 votes from 2016 to 2020. Across the state, turnout increased by 169,000 votes.

We can dismiss the drops in overall support as a function of the larger field of candidates. The drop in raw vote totals, though? That’s harder to wave away. Clearly much of Sanders’s success in 2016 was a function of opposition to Clinton’s candidacy, but that Sanders hasn’t expanded his base of support in early states since 2016 suggests that one might take his assertions about being able to spur turnout with a grain of salt. . . .

It’s not clear, though, how much enthusiasm exists beyond the tens of thousands at the rallies. Polling of enthusiasm for Democratic candidates has often shown that Sanders doesn’t have a huge advantage over his competitors. A CNN-SSRS poll taken in late January, for example, suggested that there wasn’t a significant difference between Sanders and Joe Biden on enthusiasm.