From Gallup:
For those who note that Bernie Sanders has only a 51% familiarity among Latino voters, I submit that this illustrates limitations of progressive outreach mechanisms working on the Senator’s behalf.
In my opinion this problem is not limited to a single campaign, but adversely affects the Democratic Party as a whole. Thus, I also submit that these limitations, if left unaddressed, will accrue to the disadvantage of the Democratic nominee in November.
Please share widely!
The two most likely candidates are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Your excellent post shows Ms. Clinton at +33, Mr. Sanders at +19, and Mr. Trump at -65 among this demographic. I submit that this spread suggests that any limitations of the Democratic Party are not likely to hurt us in a match-up against Mr. Trump in this demographic.
I’m not sure how to use the “familiarity” to weigh these results. It certainly appears that a HUGE number of Hispanics are familiar with Mr. Trump and overwhelmingly dislike him. I slightly smaller number of Hispanics are familiar with Ms. Clinton and generally like her.
Of the Hispanics who know Ms. Clinton and Mr. Sanders, this data suggests a rather marked preference for Ms. Clinton.
I see good news here for either Democratic candidate if Mr. Trump is nominated. I just don’t see, at least in this data, evidence of the “limitations” you mention in your concluding sentence.
… that the Republican ‘establishment’ (such as it is) opposes Donald Trump, not on ideological grounds, but on the premise, as one wonk recently put it, “every number we have says he’s going to lose large in November.”
If the collection of amoral jackasses known as the GOP can run behind Romney, Ryan, Rubio and Cruz, both Bushes, McCain, Palin and Ronald Reagan, surely they’d run Trump if they thought he would win. They don’t. They, in fact, think he’s going to tank hard in the general and take, at the least, the Senate with him. Maybe they’re wrong… but I’m hard pressed to see how.
Not something I often do with you.
In my view, that establishment has never really accepted that GWB is not fondly remembered, and expected Jeb! to emerge as a consensus candidate. Also, they are more of a “movement” party now than a conservtive party, and Trump simply doesn’t match up to a lot of “movement” positions.
I agree with the rest, but not this:
Of the Hispanics who are familiar with Hillary Clinton, 69.4% have a favorable.
Of the Hispanics who are familiar with Bernie Sanders, 68.6% have a favorable.
Two out of three Hispanics who are familiar with Ms. Clinton like her (59/85). Two out of three Hispanics who are familiar with Mr. Sanders like him (35/51).
You are making the assumption that ALL of the favorables come from people who are familiar with the candidate. That is not necessarily true.
I’m pretty sure the poll results are constructed to require that the three columns (favorable, unfavorable, no opinion) are percentages of those familiar with the candidate.
The “favorable”, “unfavorable”, and “no opinion” columns add to 100%. If “unfamiliar” respondents are included in that, then all the numbers become meaningless.
..to discover that Donald Trump has such high unfavorables among this population! I can’t possibly imagine why that would be:)
And it’s too bad they won’t be the margin of victory in OH, MI, PA and WI which Trump is currently projected to win since he is winning whites makes under 250,000 by a far wider margin than Romney was four years ago.
These numbers also show that a Castro on the ticket isn’t necessary, neither is any Latino. Hillary should shore up her white working class flank by picking a staunch progressive protectionist like Sherrod Brown who outpolled Obama and Romney last go around and would really keep those states in the fold.
Projected by whom? The current RealClearPolitics averages have Clinton beating Trump by 3.4% in Ohio, 10.5% in Wisconsin, 7.8% in Michigan, and 1.7% in Pennsylvania. Also, as mentioned in another comment, I’ve seen little evidence that Trump is winning white voters by “a far wider margin than Romney was four years ago.” If anything, the polling indicates that Trump is doing about as well, or worse than Romney, among white voters. I’m curious what numbers you have seen that indicate otherwise.
Sherrod Brown would be a solid VP pick in isolation, but given the importance of retaining the Senate — and that Kasich would pick Brown’s successor should Brown become VP — picking a Senator, at least one from a red-leaning or swing state, would jeopardize the Democrats’ chances of controlling the Senate. Given that VP picks have historically had little influence on the general election results, it would be giving up quite a bit for at most a marginal gain. (Luckily, there’s still plenty of time to debate potential Veep picks).
It is a little disconcerting that this immoderate policy is being supported by a neofascist on the one hand and a neoBolshevik on the other, as if this is 1924.
Plenty of Latino non-voters are reportedly making arrangements to become eligible by November. What is your source for Trump being projected to win?
On familiarity, there are clearly People Who Were Already National Celebrities (Hillary & Trump), and then Everyone Else.
Hillary has gone from 64% Democratic support and +57 on Bernie 9 months ago to 51% and just +11 now, but it’s Bernie & progressives who are having trouble expanding their support? Really?
The truly impressive number here is Kasich, who was in Congress for 20 years, on Fox “News” for several years after that, and then governor of America’s 7th-largest state, yet has apparently avoided making much of an impression on anyone.
The job of campaigns is to increase their candidate’s name recognition. As with black voters, the Sanders campaign failed with the Latino electorate.
This is late in the cycle, and only 51% of the sample Latino electorate has ever heard of Sanders. The numbers you cite are for the electorate as a whole, not those specific cohorts that will be necessary for a Democratic victory in November.
And I took pains not to make this an anti-Sanders post, but an operational critique of the Democratic Party’s limitations re: outreach and field operations. For what it’s worth the Clinton campaign has had conspicuously lousy field this cycle – and I include South Carolina.
Like it or not, the Republicans have organizational advantages, as well as an edge in operational morale (all those fired-up Trump supporters). The “We-don’t-have-to-do-no-stinking-work-because-Trump-is-a-crazy-bigot” meme is dangerous because it is used as a rationale for avoiding the necessary infrastructure building.
I look at the same data and see a different meaning than you, apparently.
You see “only” 51% of the sample Latino electorate that has heard of Sanders, and use that to springboard to a criticism of the field operation of Ms. Clinton — yet this very sample has HER familiarity at 85%. If increasing familiarity is a goal of a field operation (the implication of the weakness of Mr. Sanders), and a candidate has 85% familiarity, then if I was a campaign coordinator I’d be tempted to focus my limited resources somewhere else.
I see a different message here. I see two non-Trump GOP candidates with familiarity scores in the same range as Mr. Sanders — Marco Rubio at 58% and Ted Cruz at 56%.
Mr. Rubio is allegedly the GOP “Hispanic” candidate, that’s a major basis of his candidacy. This sample show him at 32/26/42 among the sampled Hispanics who HAVE heard of him. This is in comparison to Mr. Sander’s at 35/16/49. Mr Cruz comes in at 26/30/44.
I look first at the favorables:
Bernie Sanders: 35
Marco Rubio: 32
Ted Cruz: 26
I look next at the unfavorables:
Bernie Sanders: 16
Marco Rubio: 26
Ted Cruz: 30
It looks to me that as Hispanic voters learn more about these unfamiliar candidates, two learnings emerge:
1. They like Mr. Sanders more than Mr. Rubio or Mr. Cruz
2. They dislike Mr. Cruz and Mr. Rubio more than Mr. Sanders
Meanwhile, between the two front-runners, Ms. Clinton wins in a landslide.
I can see how this poll might be interpreted by the Sanders campaign as a crisp reminder of the importance of getting the candidate known to the Hispanic community — nearly half are unfamiliar with him, and he is well-liked (or at least not disliked) by those who are familiar with him.
In my view, this poll actually teaches the opposite of your claim about the Clinton campaign or the party as a whole. In fact, this poll SUPPORTS the “We-don’t-have-to-do-no-stinking-work-because-Trump-is-a-crazy-bigot” meme.
How else can you interpret this community’s reaction to a candidate with an EIGHTY-NINE percent familiarity score, a TWELVE percent “favorable” score, and SEVENTY-SEVEN percent “unfavorable” score?
NINE out of TEN Hispanic voters know Donald Trump and THREE out of FOUR of those voters DISLIKE him.
How much more could a field operation improve this result?
One of the limitations of polling in isolation is that sentiment does not automatically equate to voting results, as Secretary Clinton discovered in Michigan.
The map is not the road.
What Sanders lacked in broad support, he more than made up in enthusiastic volunteers who got his folk to the polls. Indeed the complacency of the Clinton effort in Michigan deserves a case study in and of itself.
I believe that the same complacency adversely affects the Democrats in the final election cycle, the same as it did those Republicans who did not take Trump seriously as a threat.
All Trump did was to make a pseudo-populist end run, enhanced by free media, and hijack the organized Right grassroots.
In the years since the Democratic Party disinvested from permanent field operations back in the Seventies(a good history of this, written in 1992, can be found here), Republicans have had a field advantage for the simple reason that their folks were – and are – more embedded on the ground.
The issue is not whether Latinos dislike Trump, but whether they are sufficiently motivated and organized to vote against him en masse. In the absence of embedded field, electoral history suggests that they are not.
This is not an ethnic-specific observation: The same applies to other traditional Democratic cohorts, including working-class white voters, who could be brought back.
Off-year and local elections, where there tends to be little competent Democratic field; hence Republican victories, prove my point.
These wars are always won on the ground.
Trump has a clear message. Clinton’s is … what? I’ll be Obama, but slightly better? It’s great that Obama’s coattails are that strong, but it’d be nice if 9 years into running for president, Hillary had a coherent message of her own. Other than “ladders of opportunity” which I seriously thought was Jeb Bush’s slogan until I heard Hillary repeat it a few times (Jeb’s was “right to rise”).