Many commentators have noted that the Democrat primary and caucus electorate in the three contests held so far is much more liberal than its counterpart when the Democrats last had a contest eight years ago. That’s true: The percentage of liberals among Democratic electorates has increased from 54 percent to 68 percent in the Iowa caucuses, from 57 percent to 68 percent in the New Hampshire primary and from 45 percent to 70 percent in the Nevada caucuses.
It’s easy to jump from that observation to the line that Bernie Sanders, among others, is peddling, that there is a big surge of liberal voters into the Democratic nomination process. Easy, but wrong, when you look at the actual numbers of voters. For Democratic caucus participation and primary voting is down from 2008 in all three of these states—down 22 percent in Iowa, down 12 percent in New Hampshire and down an estimated (because Democrats don’t report the numbers and we depend on journalist Jon Ralston’s estimates) 32 percent in Nevada. That’s in vivid contrast to Republican turnout, which was up significantly in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Here are some numbers, extrapolated from entrance and exit poll percentages and reports of turnout, which tell what’s actually happening. They are estimates of the total number of Democratic voters who described themselves as very or somewhat liberal and the number who described themselves as moderate or conservative (there aren’t very many of the latter, as one would expect), for 2016 and 2008. I have rounded out the estimates to the nearest thousand, to avoid spurious precision.
State and year……total………liberals………mod/con
Iowa 2016………171,000………116,000………55,000
Iowa 2008………220,000………119,000………101,000
NH 2016…………253,000………172,000………78,000
NH 2008…………287,000………164,000………126,000
Nevada 2016……….80,000………56,000………24,000
Nevada 2008………118,000………53,000………66,000
About the same number of self-described liberals are voting in Democratic contests this year as in 2008. There has been no surge of liberals into the caucuses and primaries. If you separate the numbers for very and somewhat liberals, you find that the numbers of very liberal voters have increased and those of somewhat liberals have decreased.
What’s happened is a flight of moderates and conservatives from Democratic contests. The number of moderates and conservatives is down 46 percent in Iowa, 38 percent in new Hampshire and a whopping 64 percent in Nevada.
You might regard this year’s Democratic contests as being determined by the liberal rump of the party, with the moderates and conservatives acting as if they had been expelled. This is an exaggeration, and there’s some evidence that the percentage of voters generally willing to identify themselves as liberal is increasing: Gallup reports that the percentage of voters identifying themselves as liberal has increased from 21 percent in 2007 and 22 percent in 2008 to 24 percent in 2015.
But it may also be that the left-leaning policies of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton this year as leaving many moderate and some of the few conservative Democratic voters with no motive to vote in nomination contests—and perhaps with no inclination to vote Democratic in the general election.
Liberal commentators earlier in the Obama years described the Republican electorate as increasingly small and isolated from the mainstream. The turnout numbers in this year’s first three contests provide a basis for describing the Democratic electorate in exactly the same terms.
