Why Warren Supporters Aren't a Lock to Get Behind Sanders

Throughout the 2020 presidential race, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have seemed like reluctant foes.

They met with each other before starting their campaigns. They had each other’s backs at the debates, until they didn’t. Most important, they agreed on how to confront the issues — boldly and structurally — if not always on the exact details.

But Warren’s pool of voters, who are casting for an alternative after she dropped out of the Democratic race Thursday, generally doesn’t look like Sanders’ base. There is reason to believe that former Vice President Joe Biden could pick up nearly as many of Warren’s former voters as Sanders does.

“Obviously the more strong liberal policy folks should break more for Sanders than Biden,” Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster, said in an interview. “But I don’t know that it’s going to be anywhere near unanimous. If Biden is over the hump and is now clearly the accepted candidate as the best to beat Trump, and there’s a coalescing of the party around that view, he’s going to gain all kinds of support.”

There is certainly significant overlap between the core support of Sanders and Warren, the party’s two leading liberals. He is particularly well positioned to usurp the kinds of older millennials and Generation X liberals who often favored Warren.

Indeed, in a Quinnipiac poll conducted early last month, when Biden was reeling from a weak performance in the Iowa caucuses, Warren’s voters were four times as likely to name Sanders as their second choice as they were to pick Biden.

Even still, only one-third of her supporters in that poll pointed to Sanders as a runner-up. That equals out to less than 5% of the Democratic electorate. Besides, a lot has happened in the past month; most other candidates have disappeared from the race, and much of the party has united behind Biden.

Most troublingly for Sanders, Warren’s support profile has roughly as much overlap with Biden’s as it does with his.

Warren’s base is heavily tilted toward college graduates, women, white people and middle- to high-earners. It’s not as if Sanders has been unable to win votes in these demographics. For instance, his backers on Super Tuesday were just as likely to be women as to be men.

But there is a working-class tilt to Sanders’ support that does not play out with Warren’s. He is diminishingly popular as you go up the income scale, whereas the opposite is true of Warren.

If the average Warren voter is an upper-middle-class white woman, Sanders is in a tough spot: He has serious vulnerabilities among this group. In Massachusetts — where Sanders beat Warren in her home state by 5 percentage points — he won just one-fifth of white women with college degrees, making this his weakest such age-education-gender group. Ultimately he lost the state to Biden by 7 points.

“For most suburban or upper-middle-class white women, Joe Biden is a pretty comfortable place to land,” Maslin said.

“There’s the Obama connection, there’s a sense of stability and experience that’s probably pretty helpful, and then to the extent that they’re being pragmatic, they probably see him as a potentially stronger candidate against Trump,” he added, though he noted that polling did not suggest that either Biden or Sanders was significantly better positioned for the general election.

The good news for Sanders is that Warren’s backers are highly likely to identify as liberals — even more so than his own — and exit polls suggest that the two candidates’ voters tend to agree on the issues.

The bad news for him is that his remaining rival, Biden, has already shown an ability to win over a solid chunk of liberal voters. In Super Tuesday states with available data, 40% to 60% of Biden voters identified as liberals.

But the moderate former vice president isn’t an ideal choice for Warren’s voters, either. He has not articulated policy goals nearly as far-reaching or precise as Warren did. Many of her higher-educated, technocratic-minded voters may struggle to find either candidate convincing.

Ultimately, Warren’s voters are likely to wash out, unless she makes a big endorsement that effectively pushes them one way or the other. And even in that case, it can be hard for candidates to break through with certain demographics that have proved stubbornly averse to them.

The fundamental problems for Sanders as he looks to stall Biden’s momentum are that he cannot seem to break through with black voters or older voters, despite his increasingly targeted appeals to African Americans and his campaign’s focus on his lifelong attempts to preserve Social Security. Warren’s base — heavily white and light on voters over 65 — doesn’t have much to offer him on those fronts.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .