Way back in January the Washington Post noticed that Hillary Clinton had difficulty getting the votes of anyone that didn't self-identify as a Democrat. Hillary had a -31 rating with Independents according to Quinnipiac polling. The headline was "Independents like Hillary Clinton less than in 2008".
A few weeks ago a new WSJ/NBS poll shows the problem is much, much worse.
An April Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that Mrs. Clinton’s favorability rating among independents had dropped 15 percentage points in the last four months alone. That poll found that 20% of independents viewed Mrs. Clinton positively, compared with 62% who viewed her negatively—a gap of 42 percentage points. In January, that same poll found her with a positive rating of 35% and a negative rating of 54%—a gap of fewer than 20 percentage points. A year earlier, four months before she launched her presidential campaign, that gap stood at just four percentage points—35% positive to 39% negative.What could have happened to turn independents away from Hillary by such an overwhelming margin? And who are these independents?
Nate Silver at 538 put two and two together and discovered that much of this deterioration in Hillary's support among independents can be found in one place - Bernie Sanders supporters.
As a result, about 40 percent of Sanders’s primary and caucus voters identify as independent, as Republican or with some party other than Democrats, according to my estimates.Hillary dominates among Democratic voters, but her support outside of the party is almost non-existent. Many Hillary supporters online are untroubled by that, but that is called denial. Silver explains it thusly.
Although Clinton’s substantial lead in pledged delegates (and larger lead in overall delegates) makes her the all-but-certain Democratic nominee, her lack of support from Sanders voters is harming her general election numbers.... But both surveys showed a large pool of undecided independents, potentially the Sanders voters that YouGov identified. If Clinton wins over those voters, she’ll gain a few percentage points on Trump in national and swing state polls, and the race will potentially look more like it did in March and April, with Clinton having a fairly comfortable lead over Trump. If not, the general election could come down to the wire.Most recent GE matchup polls have shown Trump closing on Clinton, and this unfavorable shift is happening at the exact same time that Sanders supporters have turned against Clinton.
According to the most recent YouGov poll, 61 percent of Sanders voters have an unfavorable view of Clinton, against just 38 percent with a favorable one. YouGov has been tracking these numbers for several months,1 and they’ve gradually gotten worse for Clinton:What Nate Silver doesn't do is speculate about why Bernie supporters had a favorable opinion of Hillary as recently as January and now view her extremely unfavorably. There are no polls that will tell us why. But I can make a few guesses.
Last winter the Clinton campaign started using a tactic rarely seen outside of a general election - slandering the entire base of a political opponent.
It’s become such an all-purpose, handy pro-Clinton smear that even consummate, actual “bros” for whom the term was originally coined — straight guys who act with entitlement and aggression, such as Paul Krugman — are now reflexively (and unironically) applying it to anyone who speaks ill of Hillary Clinton, even when they know nothing else about the people they’re smearing, including their gender, age, or sexual orientation. Thus, a male policy analyst who criticized Sanders’ health care plan “is getting the Bernie Bro treatment,” sneered Krugman. Unfortunately for the New York Times Bro, that analyst, Charles Gaba, said in response that he’s “really not comfortable with [Krugman’s] referring to die-hard Bernie Sanders supporters as ‘Bernie Bros'” because it “implies that only college-age men support Sen. Sanders, which obviously isn’t the case.” ...A USA Today/Rock the Vote poll from two weeks ago found Sanders nationally “with a 19-point lead over front-runner Hillary Clinton, 50 percent to 31 percent, among Democratic and independent women ages 18 to 34.” One has to be willing to belittle the views and erase the existence of a huge number of American women to wield this “Bernie Bro” smear.BernieBros was always a myth, but that never stopped the Clinton campaign. Quite the opposite. Instead of moderating the misogynistic slandering of Bernie supporters, Hillary fans have reacted by doubling down and calling Bernie supporters racists as well. And unlike Trump, who is willing to acknowledge that some Mexicans might not be rapists, Hillary supporters have no problem making blanket statement that all Bernie supporters, every single one of them, are racist and sexist. But it's only Bernie supporters that are the problem, not Hillary supporters. Riiiiight.
What makes this unusual is that this tactic is rarely applied outside of a general election. Oh sure, it's not unusual for things to get nasty between candidates during primaries. That's par for the course. Welcome to politics. The difference is that you always want to get your opponents voters' support after the primaries are over. That's why slandering those voters, all of them, is a stupid, self-defeating, long-term strategy.
I could go into why trying to attribute a small number of abusive, anonymous, online posters who claim to be Bernie supporters as representative of all of them is obviously dishonest. I could go into the fact that some of that abuse never came from Bernie supporters at all, and was wrongly misattributed. I could go into the fact that the internet is not a nice place, and pretending that this is something new is dishonest. You can read it all here.
Instead I'm going to focus on the idea that Clinton supporters can slander and belittle all Sanders supporters and still think they can guilt them into voting for Hillary. Just how Stockholm Syndrome'd do you think progressives are?
These people are self-identified independents. They don't feel any loyalty to your candidate from the start. Calling them names isn't going to work. So what exactly were you thinking? That you didn't need the independent vote? Congrats then, because you don't have it.