BERNIE WHO?

A revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall. ~ Che Guevara 

The Republican and Democratic presidential primaries have finally ended. Whew. So now we’re witnessing the Republicans’ presumptive nominee Donald Trump and the Democrats’ presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton starting to circle each other (near the rope-lines) in the first round of the up-coming election prize fight – only a mere 140 days away. But wait, Bernie (coulda-been-a-contender) Sanders hasn’t yet thrown in his towel and insists he’ll be running for president forever. Really? Meanwhile his most fervent “Bernie or bust” followers had a gathering in Chicago this past weekend to drum up an alternative something, such as finding like-minded candidates to run for office somewhere and sometime. That's all well and good. I’m all for having people with political beliefs organize and seek an enhanced society.

But by not now pledging his support nor endorsing Hillary, Bernie seems myopically oblivious to the dangerous wild elephant now prancing in the political ring – Donald Trump.

Perhaps Bernie wants to continue the high he’s been riding for a while, but the reality of the lows of his actual political performance (based on the number of actual votes his followers managed to provide in California and DC, among other primaries) won’t allow it to continue.

Bernie’s youthful followers have been impressive in their attendance at his rallies, but many of them forgot to actually vote for their leader. Oops. Almost 16 million people voted for Hillary Clinton, 12 million voted for Bernie Sanders. Of the Democratic primary/caucuses held in the United States, he won 22, she won 29. He lost, fair and square.

So what really happened with the much-discussed and pontificated younger voters that Bernie appealed to as a central cohort of his campaign? As I’ll show, the 2016 democratic primary voting patterns for youth participation are not much different from primaries in the past. Younger people simply didn’t vote in sufficient numbers to lift their candidate (this time, Bernie) to victory. It’s a familiar story. So much for the media-hyped “revolution” of Bernie Sanders.

Hillary’s victory was due to many factors, but demography was a key one, just like it was Bernie’s demise. This is illustrated in the table below.

Bernie Sander’s Phantom Revolution (Percent of total voters by age group)

	Voters under 30 years old		40-64 years	45-59 years	65+ years	60+ years
State	2016	2008	2016	2008	2016	2008
Florida	15%	9%	46%	33%	25%	39%
	[64%]
Illinois	17%	15%	46%	32%	22%	23%
	[86%]
North Carolina	18%	14%	49%	34%	20%	26%
	[72%]
New York	18%	15%	45%	33%	19%	30%
	[65%]

Numbers in brackets represent percent of voters under 30 years old who voted for Sanders.Source: USNews.com

This table shows that young voters, here characterized as people under-30 years old based on exit polls, accounted for at most only 18% of all 2016 voters in these 4 states. I did not find age-based primary state voter information except for these states. Nevertheless, they do represent a range of geographic and political characteristics. As you can see, middle-aged and older voters account for far larger proportions of actual voters. Middle-age voters represent between 2.5 and 3 times as many actual voters as young voters. Also illustrated in the table is that despite much media attention to Bernie’s youth “revolution” the percentage of youth voters in 3 of the 4 states didn’t significantly increase in 2016 from 2008. Surprisingly, young voters in Florida, which is usually associated with much older people, almost doubled in 2016.

Sen. Sanders captured very large majorities of youth voters in these states, as shown in the table – from 64% in Florida to an astounding 86% in Illinois. But percent of voters who were young (under 30) who voted for Bernie was very low; ranging from 9.6% in Florida to 14.6% in Illinois because of their low voter participation rates mentioned above. Despite receiving 86% of young voters’ preference in Illinois, he lost the state to Hillary.

It’s always puzzled me why the media, marketers and politicians continuously emphasize the importance of “youth” and seem to neglect older people who have both more resources (aka, money) to spend on stuff and vote far more regularly and reliably. Sure, the vast majority of young people eventually become income-earning adults who exhibit behaviors (like voting) that youth don’t, but as the table shows “middle-age” people substantially out-vote young people.

This important age-based distinction holds even when you normalize by how much of our 2010 population was in each of the 3 age groups shown for 2016 in the table. The ratio of the average share of voters for each of the 3 age-groups in the 4 states’ primaries shown in the table divided by that age group’s share of the US population shows the oldest age group (65+ years old) voted 70% above their population share; the middle-age group (40-64 years old) voted 40% above their share. The under-30 year old group voted only 10% above its population share, which is fine, but hardly noteworthy.

From a media perspective, it comes down to middle-age voters aren’t “revolutionary”; they’re simply once again exercising their constitutional prerogative. Yet when less than one in five young people actually votes, it’s headline worthy.

For Bernie, young people have been very willing to attend rallies with thousands of their cohorts probably as a social event, but not at all interested in actually voting as a political act. In this strange way, perhaps the multitudes of Bernie backers are socialists – with a small “s” – participating solely in an exciting communal social activity believing there was no other obligatory action required (like casting one’s vote on election-day). Go figure.

So why are young people seemingly so reluctant to vote? No one really can explain it, but Russell Dalton (a professor at UC/Irvine) has examined political engagement among various age groups over the past few decades. His assessment concludes that young adults just aren't as engaged as they used to be. Dalton says if politicians want young people to vote, they need to incentivize them. Wow. Conversely, older folks are much more engaged. Dalton portrays this divergence as constructively as possible by referring to millennials’ lack of voting caused by “the long slope of differences by life stage is getting steeper, with less involvement in youth and more involvement in later life.” The long slope of differences by life stage? That makes no sense at all; mostly because the act of voting is neither difficult nor arduous.

So Bernie, you’ve retreated to Burlington and taken a well-deserved rest, perhaps even hiked in the beautiful Green Mountains. Now you need to formally quit your campaign and say good bye to your Secret Service guardians. Finally and most importantly, you need to start actively and unqualifiedly assisting Hillary to defeat The Donald. If you wisely give her campaign the resources she deserves, you’ll get at least one more spotlight’s worth of attention and thanks. If you don’t, it will be “Bernie who?” Oh, he’s the old man who decided not to help when the Democrats needed it.

If you don’t, you will have failed to make Che Guevara’s apple really fall and the 85% of American citizens who are older than 30 will wonder and blame you for why you haven’t taken any action to defeat Donald J. Trump, the insidious threat to our precious democracy. Do the right thing Bernie, and stay relevant. 

July 12, 2016 Addendum, Bernie's endorsement.

Why did this take soooo long? Today, Bernie finally endorsed Hillary.

I’d say it’s taken this long because, to no one's surprise, Bernie’s played-hard-to-get with Hillary. And her weakness as a candidate probably augmented the importance of his endorsement. Her difficulties remain the continued challenge of “explaining” her disastrous email server issue that won’t go away even on Nov 9 when she’s hopefully been elected president.

Her negotiations with Bernie during the past month or so to get his endorsement only really matters to inside-the-beltway Democratic potentates and princesses (P&Ps); and only for the next 16 days, until the Dems’ convention ends.

No other folks except these P&Ps give a damn about what’s in the Dems’ (or the Repubs’) platform. Furthermore, as this blog showed, his core supporters include young “idealistic” people who haven’t ever pulled their voting weight in any national election. It’s not likely that these people, on the margin, are worth that much effort to harvest for Hillary. If I were Hillary, I'd put Bernie solely in charge of this task. 

No one knows how many Bernie backers will vote for Hillary. You get wildly different answers, depending on which poll you cite. On the one hand, “Recent polls show that only a small fraction of them would support her...” But another poll says that “The vast, vast majority of those who supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary will support Hillary Clinton in the general election.” Go figure.

In fact, her leftward turn to induce the Bernie or Busters’ reconciliation and votes makes me concerned about her judgement. His most fervent backers seem so “principled” that they feel “betrayed” by Bernie’s endorsement as well as Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s public endorsement of Hillary. These Bernie backers are barely tangentially-related with the real world of politics and political progress. Their disdain for actually casting votes speaks for itself.

As for the fantasy idea that Hillary should offer Bernie a place on the Democrats ticket as vice president, OMG. According to poll fielded in May, “You're going to hear a lot in the days ahead about possible vice presidential candidates, but when it gets right down to it, voters don't place a lot of importance on the person in the number two slot. Most say a presidential candidate's running mate is somewhat important, but just a third of voters rate the vice presidential nominee as Very Important to how they will vote in the upcoming presidential election. The sentiment is generally the same among both Democrats and Republicans.”

Bernie is a failed candidate. His campaign was interesting, provocative and worthy. Now, like all losers in the presidential primary process, he’s mostly forgotten but not yet gone. He’s a loner with a germane but narrow message that appealed to a small part of the electorate that (as my blog demonstrated) doesn’t vote much.

Despite the media’s proclamations, Bernie won’t be much remembered in 4 months, let alone a year from now. His “revolution” wasn’t. Perhaps his endorsement will provide some lift to Democratic pols, but party “unity” seems a much over-sold virtue as far as actual American voters are concerned. Get on with it Hillary, keep campaigning hard and pick a VP who’s not a Senator from a state with a Republican governor (like Elizabeth Warren), who would be replaced by a Republican.