“Although no candidate has won the hearts and minds of all female voters, it is Bernie Sanders who has made the most progress.”
Suburban women, as Nicole Goodkind writes in Fortune, “were [of] crucial to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and will be equally crucial to his re-election campaign next year.” granted, and the same can be said for more centrist Democrats.
Goodkind refers to data released by the Federal Election Commission and analyzed by the Center for Responsive Politics which shows that women are more involved in elections than in earlier cycles. Fortune reports: “More than 1 million [women] have already donated $ 131 million to presidential candidates.”
And while no candidate has won the hearts and minds of all female voters, it is Bernie Sanders who has made the most progress.
“Of all potential 2020 candidates,” Goodkind writes, “Sanders raised the most money from women and raised around $ 17.1 million in specified contributions, or 40% of his total funds.”
Many of those women come from the suburbs, the same that Trump must win. Sanders’ received more than $ 13 million in donations of small dollars from nearly 280,000 suburban women. Sanders combined donations with small and large dollars and earned more than all other presidential candidates among suburban women with a total of $ 15 million from both small and large donors. “
These figures challenge the prevailing wisdom that democrats must be aggressively moderate to win elections, a position that gained momentum last week after democratic victories at state level in Kentucky, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Senator Mark Warner, D-Va., Told The Hill on Friday that candidates won in his state because they “had more moderate problems”.
He added that candidates “had followed very much in the traditional Virginia Democratic model that we are going to give you a responsible government, it will be tax responsible.”
“I happen to believe that America is a center-right country and that people want us to work on the aisle, and that they are most interested in problem solving rather than rhetoric,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif, who endorsed Joe Biden, explained it to The Hill.
Brad Bannon, a democratic strategist and consultant, is not so sure. “This is bad news for Biden, it shows that he has a problem with the female voice,” he told Fortune, regarding the new data on suburban women. “And if you look at the polls, women will vote considerably more for [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren or Sanders than Biden. “
Suburban women are not the only counter-intuitive demographics for a candidate whose supporters are often referred to as “Bernie Bros” and who are believed to be young, left-wing white men. In addition to Fortune reporting, Foreign Policy investigated political contributions from US National Security service staff, also using data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Per foreign policy:
When combining contribution amounts, Sanders is the largest beneficiary of national security support, followed by [mayor Pete] Buttigieg and Warren. Democratic leader Biden and President Donald Trump are chasing those candidates, with a ranking of no more than a third for a department.
When broken down by government sector, Buttigieg had the highest support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Sanders from the army.
Sanders, the New York Times reported this weekend, “has collected more money from Latino voters than any other democratic candidate and has raised three times as much of the group as Barack Obama in 2008.”
According to a series of new investigations from The New York Times and Siena College, the Vermont senator draws “28% of the Democratic primary vote in six swing states.”
In another poll from a crucial state, California, conducted by the California Public Policy Institute, 39% of California’s Latinos said they prefer Sanders, compared to 21% for Biden and 5% for Warren.
Anthony Mercado, a 48-year-old maintenance officer, explained Sanders’ call to Latinos for the New York Times: “We are a community of struggle, and this is a man who knows struggle … .. Latinos have promised things and then change the winds. But he says the same things from the beginning. “
