As I mentioned just after the first Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton’s support has increased substantially among our readers. But the gender breakdown is striking. Now, needless to say, I’m not surprised that Clinton has stronger support among female voters. But the split between men and women is quite stark.
At present, among male readers Clinton beats Sanders 48% to 40%. Among female readers, however, her margin is 61% to 29%. So a relatively close race among men and a two to one advantage among women.
We also looked at the breakdown by ideology. Here the results aren’t terribly surprising. But it’s interesting to see how the numbers break down. We’ve been experimenting with various ways readers and voters classify themselves ideologically. We’ve tried different words and phrases like “left” “center-left” “liberal” “progressive” etc. But these words have a very muddy and inconsistent meaning. Nowadays “progressive” is often used to signify more to the left than “liberal”. But in the 90s, “progressive” was being used by people closer to the center to distinguish themselves from “liberals”. So for instance, the DLC’s think tank was the Progressive Policy Institute. Both meanings seem current today.
So what we’ve tried doing more recently is using a simple numeric breakdown. “On a scale of 1 to 10, in which 1 is the furthest left and 10 is the furthest right, where would you place yourself on the ideological spectrum?”
This approach has shortcomings too. But it at least dispenses with some of the language ambiguity. If you say you’re a 1 you are definitely further to the left than someone who says they’re a 4, etc. We also add simple text descriptors after each number 1 (far left), 2 (left), 3 (center left), 4 (center left), 5 (just left of center).
So how did it breakdown?
Only among 1s does Sanders beat Clinton. And by a big margin, almost two to one: Clinton 32% Sanders 58%.
Even among 2s, though, Clinton is narrowly ahead: Clinton 47%, Sanders 44%. Among 3s Clinton is already ahead 2:1. And it’s basically the same for 4s and 5s.
