Hey everyone, I'm Dylan Dryer, co-host of The Third Hour of Say, and Mom to Three Wild Boys. I've learned a lot in my years as a parent, mostly that I don't have it all figured out yet, and I'm not the only one. This is my new podcast, The Parent Chat. Each week, I sit down with someone new, for honest conversation, and real-world advice about parenting.
I am over here just like winging it. Hey, I'm just trying not to screw my own kids up, I'm not giving you advice when I screw yours up. Search the Parent Chat on YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to The Lid from Meet the Press.
I'm Curie Dan. Hindsight, as they say, is 2020. It's easy to say now that maybe some extra safety precautions on the Titanic might have been a good idea, or that maybe getting back together with the X that all of your friends called the emotional vampire was always going to be a little regrettable. Hindsight in politics also lends itself to seeing the events of the past in a very different light, and a weird thing that has happened in 2016, because we are in many ways reliving a lot about the 2016 Democratic primary, has a couple of very important differences now, and those differences were very obvious in one place in particular last night in Michigan.
Four Bernie Sanders, despite a loss in the state of Michigan, as well as Missouri and Mississippi and even Idaho, which I will admit I did not see coming, Bernie Sanders says he is staying in the race, and he looks forward to debating Joe Biden this Sunday. But I want to look at that decision that Bernie Sanders announced today through the lens of Michigan, because perhaps even more than super Tuesday, one of the founding principles of the Sanders campaign took a big hit with this loss in Michigan. So let's go into the numbers, shall we? Now, Michigan is a state that Bernie Sanders unexpectedly won by the tiniest of margins in 2016.
It was a huge shot in the arm for his campaign against Hillary Clinton. Last night, NBC News projected a win for Joe Biden, 90 seconds after polls closed in the state, which was wow. And at the time of this recording, Biden is leading with 93 percent of the vote in in the state by some 17 points. So what changed in the last four years?
Some things were the same. Sanders in Michigan cleaned up with voters under 45. In fact, his margins with that group were very close to his margins against Hillary Clinton four years earlier. Biden won black voters in Michigan.
They make up about one fifth of the Democratic electorate there, and he won them by about 40 points, which is almost the same as Hillary Clinton won them four years ago. So the big change came with white voters. And perhaps even more specifically, white voters without a college degree, which I cannot emphasize enough has really huge implications for Bernie Sanders. In Michigan, in 2016, Bernie Sanders won white voters by 14 points.
He won white college graduates by 11, those without a college degree by 15 points. And particularly on that last number, those kind of big margins with white voters without college degrees were what made him argue that white working class voters who ditched the Democratic Party for Donald Trump just a few short months later after the Michigan primary would have stuck with him if he'd been the nominee. What happened last night? Joe Biden won white voters with and without a college degree in Michigan, each by double digits, and he broke even or even had a slight advantage with white men, who Bernie Sanders won by wait for it 25 points four years earlier among voters who were either in a union themselves or that have a union member in their household.
There was more than a 20 point swing in Joe Biden's direction. Now Bernie Sanders has always argued that he is the right person to bring working people into the Democratic process, people who have felt disaffected, people who haven't turned out before, or who may have even voted for Trump because they liked his stances on trade and his anti-establishment rhetoric, which by the way, both men share at least rhetorically. That certainly did not become a reality for Bernie Sanders with many African-American voters who have broken overwhelmingly against Bernie Sanders and for Joe Biden. So if you're losing black voters and union voters and white working class voters in the Rust Belt, that is a big blow.
Now could something happen in their future to turn that around? This race has changed about 30 times in the last six weeks, but it certainly takes a lot more creativity and imagination to think about that possibility than it does the status quo. Now I started off by talking about hindsight, and that's for this reason. We've now seen two elections in the same state where a Democratic establishment candidate ran against Bernie Sanders.
The difference between a stunning loss and a huge win for that establishment candidate was largely about white working class voters. The thinking at the time in 2016 was that Bernie Sanders had a unique knack for talking to those folks, that his message was particularly resonant with white working class voters, and that's what was going to build his coalition of young people, workers both white and non-white, Trump curious world whites. But the fact that those voters rejected Clinton but then turned around and chose Biden in an all-important state like Michigan, who, yes, does have a natural kinship with labor from his long career, but he also has a policy profile that's ultimately not that different than Hillary Clinton's. It all may be more evidence that a lot of those Sanders voters in 2016 were just a lot more anti-Hillary Clinton than they were pro-Bernie Sanders.
Of course, that's perhaps much more obvious in hindsight. Just like it now seems obvious that you did not actually need to buy the megapack of gummy worms, just in case you have to self-quarantine, the regular pack would have been plenty. That's a lid for us. If you'd like to hear more of this free audio briefing, you can always download us on your favorite podcast app.