COLUMBIA, South Carolina — Bernie Sanders lost South Carolina, but he won the alienated vote. That’s one way to read the exit polls.
Joe Biden won nearly every group: The liberals and the moderates, the white and the black, every region of the state. But Sanders won some subgroups.
The 17% of the state that never attends church voted overwhelmingly for Sanders.
White voters with no college degree also voted for Sanders. Some of that is surely current college students. But some of it is the white working class.
Also, Sanders won among non-Democrats, those who have never voted before, and those who might not vote Democratic in the fall.
No college, no church, no history with or dedication to the party they’re voting in?
That’s the same exact profile as the Trump voter. I laid that out in detail in my book, Alienated America. It’s the Alienated vote: Voters who lack a sense of belonging voting for a revolution.
We saw it in earlier states: Sanders won the New Hampshire voters who never attended college, and he easily won those who never attend church while finishing third among those who attend frequently.
If you belong to things, you’re less likely to turn to Sanders to find meaning.
And a lot of what Sanders offers is exactly that: meaning and sense of belonging. He constantly talks of “empowering” people. Many people are empowered by the things they belong to — a local community, a college, a club, a congregation. If you don’t belong to these things, you may turn to Sanders for that sense of empowerment.
Sanders thinks of himself as very different from Trump, and in many ways, he is. But his electoral success — and failures — make his candidacy look a lot like Trump’s.
