Kerby Anderson

Nicholas Phillips recently wrote about what he called “The Sham of American Centrism.” He tried to explain why former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz would fail as a presidential candidate. While doing that, he cites a report for the Voter Study Group that helps explain the 2016 presidential election and may even predict the 2020 election.

The study plotted a public opinion survey of the 2016 electorate along an X-Y graph. The X-axis represents economic views and the Y-axis represents social views. Voters who are social conservatives and economic conservatives are in the upper-right quadrant. Voters who are liberal on both social and economic issues are in the lower-left quadrant. Howard Schultz (who is a social liberal but a fiscal conservative) would be in the lower-right quadrant where a mere 3.8 percent of the electorate can be found.

Those who voted for Donald Trump were in both the upper-left and upper-right quadrants. He appealed to both traditional conservatives and populists. By contrast, those who voted for Hillary Clinton cluster mostly in the lower-left quadrant. These voters were very liberal both on social issues and economic issues.

This illustrates why so many of the announced Democratic presidential candidates are promoting very liberal policies. Those who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 are uniformly liberal on social and economic issues often to the extreme. They will be the ones who will select the next Democratic presidential candidates in 2020.

This Voter Study Group graph might become quite useful in predicting both the Democratic presidential nominee and even the eventual winner of the 2020 presidential election.