Sanders' Super Tuesday performance hurt by low youth turnout
Biden benefited from older voters turning out on Super Tuesday
Bernie Sanders and his proponents have hinged his electability against President Trump on the Vermont senator’s power to appeal to disaffected independents and ex-Democratic voters and by generating a massive youth turnout.
But exit polls from the primaries held on Super Tuesday, when Joe Biden scored a surprising string of victories in nine out of 14 states, which resurrected his campaign and frontrunner status, show that more young voters went to the polls this election cycle but they represented a smaller percentage of the entire electorate than they did in 2016, USA Today reported.
In Virginia for example, more than 1.3 million voters cast ballots on Tuesday, compared to about 780,000 in 2016. Despite that, the share of those voters who were young declined from four years ago. Biden won Virginia by 30 percentage points.
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A similar trend took place in five other states that Biden won: Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Although those states all have fewer delegates than California, which Sanders handily won, Biden won by huge margins in all of them, making him the big winner of the night.
According to The Washington Post, exit polls showed only about 1 in 8 voters were between the ages of 18 and 29 years old. Median support for Sanders among that group was about 60 percent, while Biden garnered just 17 percent. Sanders also scored major support from those between the ages of 30 to 44, with about 41 percent of the vote.
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But almost two-thirds of voters were over the age of 45, a demographic that Biden dominates. A median of 42 percent of voters between 45 and 64 supported Biden, compared to 20 percent for Sanders. And a median of 48 percent of voters old than 665 supported Biden, while just 15 percent supported Sanders.
Biden currently has 467 delegates, while Sanders trails at 392 delegates, according to the Associated Press’s delegate tracker. Candidates need 1,991 delegates in order to clinch the nomination during the party’s July convention in Milwaukee.
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