Whoa! That’s what Michigan Democratic primary voters said to Hillary Clinton in her seemingly unstoppable drive to the party’s presidential nomination. March polls showed Clinton leading Bernie Sanders by a 21 point margin. The final vote was Sanders 50 percent, Clinton 48 percent. Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com wrote that the largest previous electoral deviation from pre-primary polling in a presidential race had come in New Hampshire in 1984, when polls showed Walter Mondale up by 17 points and Gary Hart won by 9. Here, the difference was even larger. What happened?
One answer is that whites, 68 percent of the Democratic voters, voted for Sanders by the considerable margin of 57 to 42 percent. Another is that blacks, 24 percent of voters, voted for Clinton by only a 65 to 30 percent margin. I have been among the analysts who expected, after the South Carolina primary, that blacks would vote 85 to 95 percent for Clinton in every primary, and that their votes would enable her to carry easily Southern states where about half of Democratic voters are black and Northern states (like Michigan and the soon-to-vote Ohio, Illinois and New York) where about one-quarter are. And so it went, in the South, enabling Clinton to win handily in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. The only exception was Oklahoma, which I passed over because it has a lower-than-national-average black percentage and I thought the exit poll numbers were quite possibly wrong. I didn’t take much note either of Nevada — the first non-Southern state with a black percentage large enough to show up in the exit poll, where Sanders won 22 percent among blacks.
But Michigan was different. The same day that 88 percent of blacks were voting for Hillary Clinton in Mississippi, only 65 percent voted for her in Michigan. This makes a big difference. Her margin of victory among blacks in Mississippi amounted to almost 50 percent of the total electorate. Her margin among blacks in Michigan amounted to just 8 percent of the total electorate. That was not enough to overcome Sanders’ margin among whites, which amounted to 10 percent of the total electorate.
As I was waiting for the returns from Detroit and Flint, presumably late-reporting, to appear in the Wayne and Genesee County totals, I assumed that they would swamp Sanders’s margins in the 72 of 79 counties he was carrying outside those two counties. After a while it became apparent it wouldn’t happen. Statewide Republican turnout was 1,319,000 votes, well above Democratic turnout of 1,188,000. That’s in a state which Democrats have carried by varying amounts, from 3 to 16 percent, in the last six presidential general elections. And, as Donald Trump said accurately in his election night
victory statement, that has been the pattern in every primary to this point (except maybe Vermont) and is evidence of potential Republican strength and Democratic weakness.
It’s evidence of weakness for Clinton in particular, in two respects. She is not carrying non-Southern whites, as she did, often by wide margins, in her 2008 campaign against Barack Obama. She lost whites in Iowa (almost certainly), New Hampshire, Nevada, Massachusetts, Vermont, Minnesota, Kansas and now Michigan. This doesn’t augur well for the general election, particularly because in her effort to attract black and green votes, she has been calling for reining in the police and pretty much ending fracking — positions that many white voters strongly oppose.
The other respect is that she is showing weakness among blacks. Black turnout is down, and if 30 percent of Michigan blacks are willing to vote against a candidate who has slavishly portrayed herself as Barack Obama’s heir, that suggests that the Obama appeal which drew so many blacks to turn out and vote Democratic has waned.
Why were Michigan blacks so much less unanimous for Clinton than Southern blacks? Here’s my hypothesis: Blacks in Michigan, and in many other Northern states, have been living under liberal governance, at the city and often at the state level, for many years. Many of them don’t find the results very satisfactory, for reasons that are understandable if you have ever driven around the streets of Detroit or Flint.
Flint’s Democratic local officials rejected a safe source of drinking water for literally a pipe dream, an infrastructure project funded by the Democrats’ 2009 stimulus bill to build a new pipeline to Lake Huron. When they decided to exit Detroit’s water system, which supplies good-quality water to most of southeast Michigan, the pipeline was, predictably, years from completion and they had to pump Flint River water through pipes that leached lead. Clinton was right when she criticized Republican state officials for not spotting the damage earlier, but the same could be said for the Obama administration’s EPA. This was a failure of government, a failure to do something — supply clean drinking water — that competent local governments figured out how to do between 100 and 150 years ago. No wonder many black Democratic voters, like most white Democratic voters, are willing to take a chance on a wild card like Sanders.
Clinton carried Flint’s Genesee County by a pathetically narrow 52 to 46 percent margin. And Genesee County cast nearly 20,000 fewer Democratic votes than Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), which voted 55 to 44 percent for Sanders. The Democrats’ base has shifted from industrial Flint to academic Ann Arbor.
Clinton can still win the Democratic nomination without white Northern voters, by accumulating enough delegates together with the horde of Democratic superdelegates. But this looks to be a dispiriting victory, one that bases the party’s general election chance on the (admittedly non-trivial) hope that the Republicans will mess up.
