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Bernie Sanders leads Donald Trump in polls, even when you remind people he’s a socialist
Socialism is unpopular, but America’s leading socialist isn’t.
It is difficult to know whether that’s true or not, but a recent message-testing experiment run by the progressive group Data for Progress at least calls that theory into question.
- By Matthew Yglesias
- on January 31, 2020 9:30 am
In their experiment, tagging Sanders as a socialist did not seem to undermine his campaign — something we’ve also seen over the years in Vermont. Sanders consistently does a bit better in elections for his Senate seat than you would expect from the state’s baseline party lean.
The poll: Calling Sanders a socialist doesn’t change much
Data for Progress used the Lucid survey sampling platform to test three different versions of a Sanders and Trump polling matchup question. The survey was in the field from January 9 to January 19 of 2020 and ran these three polls:
In all three versions, Bernie beats Trump, albeit by slightly different margins. Sanders does best in the version of the question that provides no information at all. Giving the candidates their partisan labels increases Sanders’s lead somewhat, and giving the hypothetical messages leaves Sanders with a lead that’s somewhere in between the two other scenarios.
- No information: “If the 2020 U.S. Presidential election was held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump?”
- Partisan cues: “If the 2020 U.S. Presidential election was held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican Donald Trump?”
- Socialists and billionaires: “If the 2020 U.S. Presidential election was held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were Democrat Bernie Sanders, who wants to tax the billionaire class to help the working class and Republican Donald Trump, who says Sanders is a socialist who supports a government takeover of healthcare and open borders?”
Underrated post.
Chairman Bern's rise to power is now inevitable.
I CANNOT wait until all you enemies of the revolution get sent away to the re-education camps.