Four years ago, in Grant County, Oklahoma, Bernie Sanders crushed Hillary Clinton, 57.1 percent to 31.9 percent.
This year, Sanders didn’t just lose Grant County — 87.5 percent white, 76.9 percent without college degrees — to Joe Biden, his percentage of the vote fell by 41 points, to 16.1 percent.
Grant County reflects what has become a nationwide pattern in the Democratic primaries, including those held Tuesday night: Sanders’s support among white working class voters has begun to evaporate.
What happened?
A crucial bloc of Sanders’s 2016 voters is no longer a part of the Democratic primary electorate. The remnant of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party that in 2016 voiced its hostility to Clinton by voting for Sanders has now turned to President Trump. Many of these former Democrats — particularly men who hold right-of-center views on race, gender and immigration — cast far fewer of their ballots for Sanders and his progressive policies this time around, compared with four years ago, when they shied away from Clinton’s perceived elitism, her ties to Wall Street, her social liberalism and the fact that she is a woman.
The erosion of Sanders’s white working class support this year raises a related question: Why did Elizabeth Warren’s campaign fail?
One source of the frustration felt by many Warren supporters lies in the fact that the Democratic Party is not as free of sexism as these voters hoped. Support for Warren in Democratic primaries fell in direct proportion to rising levels of what political scientists call “hostile sexism.”
