West Virginia Democrats could face mass defections in November, especially with Hillary Clinton as the party’s presidential nominee, according to exit polls.
ABC News found that one-third of voters they surveyed leaving polling places after participating in the Democratic primary said they would support Donald Trump over Clinton in the general election. Forty-four percent said they would stick with Clinton, 21 percent said neither.
Bernie Sanders, who won the West Virginia Democratic primary, did only slightly better with 48 percent saying they’d pick the Vermont socialist in November, 32 percent who said they would vote for Trump while 18 percent opted for neither.
These numbers may also be skewed by an influx of independents and, to a much lesser extent, Republicans in West Virginia’s open Democratic primary. Only 59 percent said they were Democrats while 33 percent identified as independents and 8 percent were Republicans.
Trump knocked his remaining Republican opponents out of the race last week while the Clinton-Sanders race is still going, even though the former secretary of state has a daunting delegate lead. Trump was heavily favored even before Ted Cruz and John Kasich ended their campaigns, while the Democratic primary was competitive but leaning toward Sanders.
That might have persuaded more Trump voters than expected to pick Democratic primary ballots. Trump himself told attendees at his West Virginia rally that they should save their votes for him for the general election.
Clinton beat Barack Obama by 40 points in West Virginia’s Democratic primary in 2008. A little over two in ten voters who cast ballots in that primary said race was a factor in their vote. They broke for Clinton over Obama 84 percent to 9 percent.
Sanders won 72 percent of the vote among the 27 percent of Democratic primary voters who wanted the next president to be more liberal than Obama. But he also took 62 percent among those who want Obama’s successor to be less liberal, a group that was a 39 percent plurality of primary voters.
Clinton won only the 27 percent who wanted to continue Obama’s policies, with 62 percent of the vote. She has done well with such voters throughout the Democratic primaries.
While West Virginia was once a solid Democratic state in presidential elections, remaining loyal to Jimmy Carter in 1980 and being one of just 10 states to vote for Michael Dukakis, it has voted Republican at the presidential level since George W. Bush’s first election in 2000.
Hillary’s husband Bill Clinton was the last Democratic presidential nominee to win West Virginia in November back in 1996. She didn’t help her chances in either the primary or the general this year by vowing to put coal miners and their employers out of business to pave the way for clean energy.
