Memes about Sanders that are false.

[Beet]

This could be much more of an effortpost, but I do not have the time at the moment to complete it, however I want to sketch out the general idea.

One prominent meme about Sanders is that he's a Eugene McCarthy/Gary Hart/Bill Bradley/Howard Dean/Barack Obama minus the blacks-style candidate. In other words, he's a youth-driven white middle class insurgent candidate who will fail to connect with people of color and the blue collar base of the Democratic party. There is some truth to this, and I outlined this thesis myself at one point in early 2015 with regard to Elizabeth Warren (this was very early in the campaign, before everyone started with it). Since then, the view has become conventional wisdom. It is being used to fuel various claims that Sanders will be inevitably crushed in places like South Carolina or Tennessee. Since then, however, the facts have changed, and as the quote commonly attributed to Keynes goes, "When the facts change, I change my mind."

Put simply, while checking every available exit poll would be required to confirm this, my impression is that none of the historically youth-driven white middle class insurgent candidates disproportionately won working-class voters. There was no particular reason for them to. Eugene McCarthy was running primary against the Vietnam war. The labor unions were going for Humphrey, and minorities wanted Kennedy. Gary Hart ran economically to the right of Walter Mondale and lost when Mondale essentially accused him of triangulation. Bill Bradley barely made a dent. Howard Dean was another anti-war candidate. Barack Obama unquestionably did disproportionately well among upper-middle class liberals. He was the third anti-war candidate on the list.

In other words, the problem with the middle class insurgent thesis is that it fails to take into account the fact that none of the other insurgencies have been based on economic populism. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, *is winning lower income Democrats.* He and Hillary are actually flipped from Obama and Hillary in 2008. Since the rise of the Reagan Democrat, it has been conventional wisdom that the poor do not respond to economically populist messages because of the  priority of social issues. However, an economically populist appeal has never been put to the voting public on the scale that Senator Sanders is. The evidence is that the working poor are responding. Sanders is polling surprisingly well in West Virginia, for example.

The takeaway is that Senator Clinton cannot rely on middle-class-insurgency thesis to take the "hick vote" and the minority vote for granted. The Democratic primary will be a race to the left, and whoever can position themselves as the more angry economic populist will be in a good position.

[Zanas]

Yeah, well, I saw this in the Iowa exit poll :

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So, yes, Sanders wins the low income, but in Iowa it seems Clinton actually won the lowest educated, and the union households. It would contradict your thesis, but the Iowa exit poll may also just be wrong.

[Averroës Nix]

The real test of the strength of Sanders' appeal among working class whites will come when we have primaries in the South and West. I'm not counting on those voters to react in the same way as Northerners and Midwesterners.

That said, early polling from South Carolina suggests that he's doing well enough among white Democrats that he must have some strength among all but the most marginal subgroups.