Post by Logan on Apr 17, 2016 7:58:42 GMT -6
Did Hillary Clinton win primaries in the South because it’s more conservative?
There's a weird dynamic at play in the Democratic primary contest. Hillary Clinton has taken great pains to question whether or not Bernie Sanders is actually a Democrat, noting that he's served in Congress for decades as an independent. Sanders, on the other hand, is critiquing Clinton for appealing to less-liberal voters. In other words, Clinton hammers Sanders for being outside the party and Sanders attacks Clinton for straying from liberal ideology.
Sanders's most common articulation of Clinton's non-liberalness is by dismissing her biggest wins as coming from more-conservative areas. He's repeatedly waved away Clinton's wins in the South as being from a more conservative area, as he did during last week's debate in Brooklyn. "No question about it," he said on Thursday. "We got murdered there. That is the most conservative part of this great country. That's the fact."
Depending on how you divvy up the "parts of the country," Sanders is correct. Each year, Gallup tracks the number of people in each state who identify as conservative or liberal and ranks where the gap between the two is widest. In 2015, Alabama was the most conservative state in the union, and Sanders's home state of Vermont the least conservative. If we consider "the South" as defined by the Census Bureau (as on the map below), it is the most conservative part of the country.
That blurs a point that's often been made in response to Sanders: He's won a lot of conservative states, too, like Idaho, Oklahoma and Wyoming. Clinton has done well in a number of very-conservative states, but so has Sanders. In fact, if you take Vermont out of the mix -- a very liberal state that backed its senator by a wide margin -- there's essentially no correlation between the conservativeness of the state and the margin of victory for either candidate.
Read more: www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/17/did-hillary-clinton-win-primaries-in-the-south-because-its-more-conservative/
There's a weird dynamic at play in the Democratic primary contest. Hillary Clinton has taken great pains to question whether or not Bernie Sanders is actually a Democrat, noting that he's served in Congress for decades as an independent. Sanders, on the other hand, is critiquing Clinton for appealing to less-liberal voters. In other words, Clinton hammers Sanders for being outside the party and Sanders attacks Clinton for straying from liberal ideology.
Sanders's most common articulation of Clinton's non-liberalness is by dismissing her biggest wins as coming from more-conservative areas. He's repeatedly waved away Clinton's wins in the South as being from a more conservative area, as he did during last week's debate in Brooklyn. "No question about it," he said on Thursday. "We got murdered there. That is the most conservative part of this great country. That's the fact."
Depending on how you divvy up the "parts of the country," Sanders is correct. Each year, Gallup tracks the number of people in each state who identify as conservative or liberal and ranks where the gap between the two is widest. In 2015, Alabama was the most conservative state in the union, and Sanders's home state of Vermont the least conservative. If we consider "the South" as defined by the Census Bureau (as on the map below), it is the most conservative part of the country.
That blurs a point that's often been made in response to Sanders: He's won a lot of conservative states, too, like Idaho, Oklahoma and Wyoming. Clinton has done well in a number of very-conservative states, but so has Sanders. In fact, if you take Vermont out of the mix -- a very liberal state that backed its senator by a wide margin -- there's essentially no correlation between the conservativeness of the state and the margin of victory for either candidate.
Read more: www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/17/did-hillary-clinton-win-primaries-in-the-south-because-its-more-conservative/