Why Bernie Sanders Failed Where Donald Trump Succeeded

For a couple weeks in February, it seemed as if history would repeat itself. An insurgent candidate with a healthy dose of self-confidence and an easily caricatured outer-borough accent was poised to capture the presidential nomination of a party he did not particularly care for and whose establishment disdained him. Bernie Sanders had won (by some measures) Iowa, repeated his 2016 win in New Hampshire, and swept Nevada. On the last day of February, though, Joe Biden, whose best showing until then was a second-place finish with less than a fifth of the vote in Nevada, swept South Carolina. Within a week, the dynamics of the race flipped as most of the non-Sanders candidates dropped out and gave their support to Biden, who took states (such as Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Washington) where he had not been expected to be competitive. So how did Bernie Sanders fail where Donald Trump had succeeded four years earlier? 

On the surface, Bernie Sanders did better in the first three primaries than he did in 2016. He repeated his near-miss in Iowa (Sanders won more votes, but Pete Buttigieg won more county delegate equivalents) and win in New Hampshire, and flipped Nevada, which Hillary Clinton won in 2016. However, since more than two candidates were running this time, these results masked a decline in Sanders's percentage of the vote: from 49.6% to twenty-six percent in Iowa, from sixty percent to twenty-five percent in New Hampshire, and from forty-seven percent to forty percent in Nevada. In hindsight, Bernie Sanders going from winning New Hampshire in a landslide against a former first lady, senator, and secretary of state to winning it in a squeaker against a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, should have raised alarms for his campaign. He was vulnerable to the consolidation of the non-Sanders vote behind a single candidate, which happened as February turned into March.

Donald Trump faced a similar weakness in 2016. Much of the Republican base was skeptical of him, and he did not win a majority of the vote in any state until his home state of New York voted in the second half of April. However, the Republicans’ rules gave Trump an advantage in collecting delegates. Even though Trump got less than a third of the vote in South Carolina, he won all of the state’s delegates by carrying all seven of its congressional districts, and even though he got only about forty-five percent of the vote in Florida, he won all of its delegates due to its winner-take-all status, a rule initially intended to help Jeb Bush. Suppose the 2016 Republicans had been using the Democrats' system, where every candidate who gets at least fifteen percent of the vote receives a proportionate share of delegates. In that case, Trump would have only gotten twenty-one of South Carolina's fifty delegates, with fifteen going to Marco Rubio and fourteen to Ted Cruz, and fifty of Florida's ninety-nine delegates, with Rubio getting thirty and Cruz nineteen. Donald Trump was able to amass a large number of delegates with less than half of the vote in early states, an option not available to Bernie Sanders. 

As the 2016 primaries went on, the candidate pool was reduced to John Kasich, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump. Trump was able to triangulate between his two rivals in a way unavailable to Bernie Sanders. The moderate wing of the party was unwilling to throw its support behind Cruz, while the conservative wing was unwilling to back Kasich. Marco Rubio, who outpolled Kasich in most early primaries, might have been able to bridge the gap, but unlike Kasich, he was unable to win his own state. By contrast, Bernie Sanders is clearly at the left end of the Democratic ideological spectrum, making him unable to play the center of the party off against a more left-wing candidate. There was also a racial dimension; white voters skeptical of Sanders tended to split their votes between the centrists Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar and the liberal Elizabeth Warren, while black and Hispanic voters (first in diverse Clark County, Nevada, and then more dramatically in South Carolina) who were skeptical of Sanders backed Biden. Given the importance of minority voters to the Democrats, the party's choice for an alternative to Sanders was obvious.

 

A Disgruntled Republican Base

 

This leads to, perhaps, the most important reason Trump was able to win the Republican nomination as an insurgent while Sanders came up short: the Republican base was dissatisfied with its establishment in a way that the Democratic base wasn't. President Obama is wildly popular among Democrats, getting a ninety-one percent approval rating in the summer of 2020, a nostalgia that seemed to rub off on his old running mate. By contrast, although George W. Bush was personally popular, with eighty-eight percent favorability among Republicans in 2015, his brother Jeb had the highest disapproval rating of any major candidate among Republican voters (especially conservatives and younger voters) even before Trump entered the race. Further down the ballot, the discontent led to a number of primary challenges to Republican senators in 2014 (no senators lost, but then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was toppled in Virginia) and would lead to John Boehner being forced out as Speaker of the House later in 2015. In hindsight, Jeb Bush running and becoming (with Trump) the leading candidate in the polls through most of 2015 was a gift to Donald Trump; it allowed him to paint himself as an anti-establishment candidate in a way he might not have been able to against, for example, Scott Walker or Marco Rubio.  

While the Bernie Sanders campaign had some superficial similarities with the Donald Trump campaign, the differences between the two explain why Trump won the nomination and the Presidency while Sanders came up short. Sanders's early victories in 2020 were with a minority of the vote, leaving him vulnerable to the consolidation of the moderate vote under a single candidate, which turned out to be Joe Biden. Donald Trump also got less than fifty percent in the early primaries in 2016, but his opposition was split between the moderate John Kasich and the conservative Ted Cruz, and the winner-take-all system the Republicans used in many states in 2016 allowed Trump to amass a large lead with pluralities of the vote. Perhaps most importantly, the Democratic establishment in 2020 had two advantages the Republican establishment in 2016 did not: a base that wasn't disgruntled with the party and the knowledge that an insurgent really could capture the nomination, as Trump did the previous cycle.

(Election data from Dave Leip's Atlas of Presidential Elections)