[I]n early April, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders traveled the economically struggling region of upstate New York, where dilapidated homes and shuttered factories dot the pastoral landscape.
In his whirlwind tour, thousands of white working class voters unnerved by economic anxieties greeted the 75-year-old democratic socialist as a rock star.
Health care is too expensive, and so is higher education, they said. Another worry: Wages today don’t allow for homeownership. Also, they added, good manufacturing jobs are gone and may never come back.
Gus Alden, a hard-core Sanders fan who attended a rally in Syracuse, had recently been laid off from an Ultrafab factory in Farmington.
“Back in my day you could get a high school education and it would take you through for the rest of your life,” said Alden, wearing a Sanders T-shirt and baseball cap. “Sanders is trying to bring education up to 16 years, which would help a lot of people that can’t afford it.”
Greg Copeland, of Buffalo, said he struggled to pay health care bills.
“The elderly have no place to go,” Copeland said. “They are against the wall, they can’t afford insurance, and they are virtually sitting and waiting to die.”
The delegate-rich Empire State was Sanders’ last real chance in the primary season to catch up to Hillary Clinton. On April 19, Sanders swept nearly every rural county, but lost New York by roughly 15 points.
Clinton, a former U.S. senator from New York, performed well in the state’s more diverse population centers, including the hub of New York City.
In Tuesday’s general election, Clinton again won New York with a similar coalition of voters. Donald Trump, however, won all the rural, working class counties where Sanders had triumphed.
And while Trump lost New York — and apparently the popular vote — he won the Electoral College and, in turn, the presidency.
His historic victory over Clinton was secured by the resounding frustration of millions of working class whites without a college degree — a constituency Clinton struggled to effectively communicate with and one where Sanders made greater inroads.
Trump reshaped the electoral map Tuesday — picking up wins in traditionally Democratic states that are part of the so-called “Rust Belt.”
New York is the eastern tip of the belt, and it stretches all the way to southern Michigan. The region, which was once dotted with big manufacturing plants, is now experiencing urban decay and job losses as a result of global economic displacement.
Trump’s upset wins on Election Day included Rust Belt states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The self-proclaimed billionaire even came close to beating Clinton in Minnesota, which has been solidly Democratic since the 1930s.
During the primary season, Sanders ran strong in many of the states where Clinton faltered Tuesday. A comparison between the primary and general election result maps begged the question Wednesday:
What would have happened if Sanders had been the Democratic Party nominee?
The Vermont senator won Minnesota and Wisconsin, and pulled a stunning upset in Michigan after pollsters gave Clinton a 99 percent chance of victory. In the New Hampshire primary, Sanders beat Clinton by 20 points. (As of Thursday morning, the Granite State was too close to call, though Clinton had a slight lead.)
Sanders also roused passionate primary support in other red, rural states like Indiana, West Virginia and Kansas, where Trump was the winner on Tuesday.
The Vermont senator’s victories in these states were secured largely by a populist message featuring tough talk on trade deals and indictments against the rich. The longtime independent promised economic equality and education for all, and he temperamentally railed against establishment Democrats, including Clinton.
“If the people of Michigan want to make a decision about which candidate stood with workers against corporate America and against these disastrous trade agreements, that candidate is Bernie Sanders,” he told more than 2,000 supporters in Traverse City in March.
It’s by no means certain that Sanders would have triumphed over Trump if he had become the presidential nominee.
But in May polling averages, Sanders was beating the reality television star by more than 10 points nationally, while Clinton was in a virtual deadlock.
Exit polls show Clinton’s loss on Tuesday came, in large part, because of a lack of enthusiasm for her among white voters, a problem Sanders did not have. Like Trump, Sanders drew tens of thousands to rallies across the country that had more passionate participants than Clinton’s events.
Not only did Sanders hold the largest political rally of the season, in New York City, where he drew 28,000, he also drew large crowds elsewhere. For example, more than 3,000 people showed up for Sanders in Morgantown, West Virginia — a red part of a red state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 20 years.
“In spite of the Democratic ground game, there weren’t a lot of Democrats excited about Hillary Clinton, and they stayed home,” said Eric Davis, a retired Middlebury College political science professor.
Davis pointed out that turnout was especially low in the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Clinton lost narrowly.
In those states, Davis estimated that Sanders — or Vice President Joe Biden — could have energized more residents.
Katherine Cramer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, said both Trump and Sanders were popular in Wisconsin because they were seen as outside of establishment politics.
Cramer spent time in the more agrarian parts of Wisconsin in research her upcoming book, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.” She said that in conversations with working white voters at diners and gas stations, a theme emerged: Working whites feel entirely disconnected from the world of mainstream politics.
“People don’t think the Democratic Party cares about them, but instead that they represent an urban elite interest, or represent people of color, people who aren’t like them,” Cramer said. “There was this pervasive sense that they thought the people in the cities thought they were redneck racists, and they resented that.”
Sanders has built a coalition of backcountry voters in Vermont. In the rural, more conservative slice of the Northeast Kingdom, Sanders earned roughly 70 percent of the vote in his last election bid in 2012. (On Tuesday, the Kingdom largely went for Trump, who won 32.6 percent of the Green Mountain vote.)
“Bernie has been a friend of the working person his entire political career,” Middlebury’s Davis said. “He’s never given six-figure speeches to banks, he doesn’t take money from corporate political donors, and he never will. Sanders clearly has authenticity, and clearly not enough voters thought Clinton had it.”
Besides his image as an outsider, Sanders’ position on trade could have also helped him overcome Trump.
James Battista, a professor of political science at SUNY Buffalo, said both Sanders and Trump share a similar trade ideology — a protectionist viewpoint sharply skeptical of deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Clinton, who once called the TPP the “gold standard,” was a flawed messenger on trade. Her husband Bill Clinton also signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has been blamed for expediting globalization and shuttering factories in America.
Roughly five million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000, and while Battista said the Sanders-Trump trade rhetoric was effective, he said the promise of bringing back manufacturing to the Rust Belt is a fairly empty one. More manufacturing is becoming automated, and the U.S. is shifting to a service-based economy.
“Offering the fantasy of starting the steel mills up again had some traction,” Battista said. “But those jobs aren’t coming back.”
Wisconsin’s Cramer said that while working class whites want manufacturing to return, she heard a greater desire for access to the American dream.
A good start on renewing this promise, Cramer contends, would be access to good public education and fast internet speeds that can enable online job training .
“The schools are the one thing left that are holding these rural communities together,” she said.
Sanders’ free college tuition plan was popular with both young and working class voters, and during the primary he also highlighted the need for better broadband.
“High-speed Internet access is no longer a luxury,” Sanders tweeted in early March. “It’s crucial for rural America to be connected and do business with the rest of the world.”
While Sanders could have picked up more white disenchanted voters than Clinton in rural places like Wisconsin and Michigan, he may very well have suffered with African American voters in the state’s large cities of Detroit and Milwaukee.
Clinton built a more diverse coalition throughout the primaries, and Sanders suffered agonizing primary defeats in important general election states like North Carolina and Florida. (Still, Clinton’s support with these groups were not enough to push her over the edge in either state.)
Clinton did win the diverse and important state of Nevada on Tuesday, which is heavily Hispanic. But much of the political organizing in Nevada is conducted by trade unions, of which Sanders is a longtime champion.
(An NBC analysis of exit poll data in 25 primary states showed that Sanders narrowly beat Clinton with black voters under 30.)
The biggest unanswered question about a Sanders’ general election bid revolves around how damaged he would have been from relentless political attacks.
“Part of why people liked Sanders was that he was never the target of opposition research,” Battista said. “If he had been the candidate there would have been ad after ad about him taking trips to Cuba and being supportive of the Castros and former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. He was a stereotypical lefty.”
Former Gov. Howard Dean — who ran to the left of John Kerry in a failed presidential bid in 2004 — said he was disappointed by Clinton’s loss Tuesday. A longtime supporter of the former secretary of state, he said there was “no way to ever know” if Sanders would have been a better candidate.
“Bernie would be a good messenger to these voters, as would be many Democrats in the party,” Dean said. “But we are not going to engage in misogyny and racism, we aren’t going to do it. To the extent that that is required to reach out, forget about it. What people are looking for is hope, and we need to give that to them, because they don’t have much of it right now.”
Asked why the party has lost working class whites, who have historically voted Democratic, Dean paused before answering in Sanders-style terms.
“Democrats have spent too much time on Wall Street and not enough time on Main Street,” he said.
Late Wednesday, Sanders released a statement on Trump, which suggested that he was willing to try and find common ground with the president-elect:
“Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids – all while the very rich become much richer.
“To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him.”