When President Trump won Michigan in 2016, the first Republican to do so since 1988, he swung 12 counties from blue to red, outperformed Mitt Romney in nearly every county, and outperformed Romney by 25 percentage points in 14 counties.
You could count those 14 counties with the largest swings to Trump as the populist places. Guess what? Those were among Joe Biden’s best counties in Tuesday’s primary. Biden outperformed his statewide average in 13 of those 14 counties, including all 11 of the counties where the Romney-to-Trump swing was greater than 25%.
In other words, Bernie Sanders is no longer the populist candidate in the Democratic race.
Biden beat Bernie among Michiganders with no college degree. Even controlling for race, he won this group, winning 50 to 43 among white noncollege graduates. Those numbers are only as close as they are because Bernie did very well among college students (who, by definition, don’t have a college degree yet). Among Michigan voters who never went to college, Biden won by 21 points, 56 to 35.
Biden won 55% to 37% among voters in union households.
Add in the fact that Biden is the candidate of the wealthy, college-educated centrists in this race, plus African Americans, and Bernie’s only remaining demographic base is college students and 20-somethings.
That’s just too small a base to carry the primary. Time for Bernie’s campaign to face the music.
