Sanders’s Horse Race: How the media explained Bernie Sanders’s loss in the 2016 Democratic primaries

Maarten Berkelaar Words: 24764 Supervisor: Dr. E.F. van de Bilt Second reader: Dr. M.L. de Vries

Abstract

This thesis analyzes how The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street

Journal explained the loss of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries. This thesis argues that conservative and liberal media focus on different explanations for Sanders’s loss and that through the style of media reporting several important factors in the Bernie Sanders’s primary defeat, such as the influence of the invisible primary, were not sufficiently explored.

Through the media’s “horse race” reporting style, which solely focuses on which candidate is ahead and which candidate is lagging behind, no attention was payed to what happened before the actual primaries and caucuses began. This thesis states, first, that there were nog significant differences in how the analyzed newspapers explained Sanders’s loss, second, that the invisible primary was overlooked by the three analyzed media outlets and, third, that the invisible primary played a key role in Sanders’s loss.

2 Table of Contents Introduction ...... 4 Chapter 1: Sanders’s Primary Race and Media reporting ...... 14 1.1 Media Framing of the Primaries ...... 15 1.2 Sanders’s Horse Race during the invisible primary ...... 20 Graph 1 ...... 23 1.3 Sanders and the Media during the 2016 Primaries ...... 24 Chapter 2: Explaining Sanders’s Loss ...... 30 2.1 Overall analysis ...... 31 Graph 2 ...... 32 2.2 The Minority Vote ...... 33 2.3 Party Troubles ...... 35 Graph 3 ...... 36 2.4 Policy ...... 39 2.5 Women and older Democrats ...... 41 2.6 Fight vs. Trump, a poor campaign strategy and a lack of experience ...... 42 2.7 So, why did Sanders lose? ...... 44 Chapter 3: The invisible invisible primary ...... 46 3.1 Headstart vs. Momentum ...... 48 3.2 Endorsements: how the 2016 primary stands out ...... 50 3.3 The media in control of the invisible primary ...... 54 3.4 The black vote already decided ...... 58 3.5 Why the invisible primary remained invisible ...... 63 Chapter 4: Conclusion ...... 65 Bibliography ...... 69 Analyzed newspaper articles: ...... 73 Graphs: ...... 87

3 Introduction

“We have shown the entire world that our ideas are not some crazy, wild, utopian fantasies.”1

———Bernie Sanders

On July 26, 2016, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign officially came to an end when he stated: “I move that all votes cast by delegates be reflected in the official record, and I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the nominee of the Democratic Party for president of the

United States.”2 Boos sounded from the crowd as Sanders officially endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for the presidency. Sanders was at first a long-shot for the presidency as the media, political experts and the American public all thought Hillary Clinton would easily win the nomination. Nevertheless, as his campaign evolved, Sanders became a real threat to Hillary Clinton. This was mainly evidenced by his incredibly strong showing in the Iowa caucuses where Sanders won 21 delegates as opposed to Clinton’s 23. In the New

Hampshire primary, he beat Clinton and took the lead in overall delegates with 36 delegates compared to Clinton’s 32.3 However, in the end, Clinton turned out to be the stronger nominee and would go on to face Donald Trump in the race for the American presidency.

When it became clear that Clinton would win the nomination, American media outlets started to give their own explanations for Sanders’s loss. Even before this, early warning signs

1 Deirdre Fulton, “‘We Made History’: Watch as Sanders Addresses His 1900 Delegates,” Common Dreams, July 25, 2016, accessed March 4, 2018, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/07/25/we-made-history-watch-sanders- addresses-his-1900-delegates. 2 Nolan Mccaskill, “Hillary Clinton Breaks the Glass Ceiling,” Politico, June 26, 2016, accessed March 4, 2017, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/dnc-kicks-off-roll-call-vote-to- nominate-clinton-226239. 3 Wilson Andrews, Kitty Bennett, and Alicia Parlapiano, “2016 Delegate Count and Primary Results,” The New York Times, July 5, 2016, accessed June 7, 2016, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/primary-calendar-and- results.html.

4 were also given. Janell Ross of The Washington Post, on March 7, 2016, wrote an article which states that Bernie Sanders did not know how to properly handle women. Ross came to this conclusion when the Vermont Senator replied with “Excuse me, I’m talking” when Clinton interrupted him during a debate.4 Sanders, in short, would need to work on his handling of women as “(…) the time where that kind of behavior — even hints of possibly sexist thinking

— will be ignored or go unnoticed is probably long dead.”5 New York Times columnist Paul

Krugman gave another warning. On April 8, 2016, Krugman stated that Bernie Sanders’ campaign had lost its ethical basis through dishonest claims when he wrote that “(…) in any case, the way Mr. Sanders is now campaigning raises serious character and values issues.”6

Moreover, the campaign, through its idealism, had brought about a sort of self-righteousness.

In other words, Sanders, according to Krugman, had lost sense of what was real. 7

Both these warnings had to do with Sanders’s image, but after the election, these warnings became explanations for his loss. Together with his image, other explanations for his loss had to with Sanders’s policies, his inability to win the minority vote, his troubles with fitting into the Democratic Party, and his campaign tactics.

Sanders’s policies and linkage to socialism had always made him an outstanding figure in American politics. Sanders’s socialist background was something the media gave great attention and Sanders himself did not shy away from it when he called himself a “democratic socialist.” Socialism has always had a bad reputation in America. A Gallup poll from 2015

4 Janell Ross, “What Bernie Sanders Still Doesn’t Get about Arguing with Hillary Clinton,” Washington Post, March 7, 2016, accessed January 26, 2018, sec. The Fix, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/07/what-bernie-sanders-still- doesnt-get-about-interrupting-hillary-clinton/. 5 Ross, “What Bernie Sanders Still Doesn’t Get about Arguing with Hillary Clinton.” 6 Paul Krugman, “Sanders Over the Edge,” The New York Times, April 8, 2016, accessed August 26, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/08/opinion/sanders-over-the- edge.html. 7 Krugman, “Sanders Over the Edge.”

5 shows that Americans are least likely to vote for a socialist as president.8 As predicted by

Gallup, this could and did hurt Bernie Sanders in his presidential bid, especially when another

Gallup poll showed that socialist was the word most used to describe Sanders during his campaign.9 In addition criticism on his policies, such as an increase in taxes, were also given.10

On the part of the minority vote, it turned out that Sanders was, as the numbers show, simply unable to win over these groups. Noam Scheiber and Giovanni Russonello of The New York

Times explained that Sanders was not popular enough and that the groups’ longstanding affection for the Clinton family were the main reasons for Sanders’s inability to win the minority vote. On top of this, African-Americans viewed Clinton more than Sanders as someone who would continue the legacy left behind by Barack Obama.11

Bernie Sanders also had his troubles with the Democratic Party. Sanders and the party were most definitely not a match made in heaven. Seeing that Sanders came in as an outsider, it is very likely that this impacted his chances in the presidential primaries. Before his campaign began, Sanders made it emphatically known, on more than one occasion, that he was not a

Democrat.12 Sanders’s policies also play a role in this. His policies do not blend well with the

8 Justin McCarthy, “In U.S., Socialist Presidential Candidates Least Appealing,” Gallup, June 22, 2015, accessed May 24, 2017, http://news.gallup.com/poll/183713/socialist- presidential-candidates-least-appealing.aspx. 9 Frank Newport and Saad, Lydia, “‘Dishonest’ and ‘Socialist’ Lead U.S. Reactions to Dems,” Gallup, February 23, 2016, accessed May 24, 2017, http://news.gallup.com/poll/189524/dishonest-socialist-lead-reactions-dems.aspx. 10 Kelsey Snell, “Sanders Tax Plan Would Raise $15.3 Trillion to Fund New Spending,” Washington Post, March 4, 2016, accessed May 25, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/03/04/sanders-tax-plan- would-raise-15-3-trillion-to-fund-new-spending/. 11 Noam Scheiber and Giovanni Russonello, “Why Clinton Is Ahead Of Sanders With Blacks,” The New York Times, March 22, 2016, sec. B, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523010602680084176914488 69811. 12 Peter Nicholas, “Bernie Sanders: ‘I Am a Democrat Now,’” WSJ (blog), November 8, 2015, accessed May 26, 2017, https://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/11/08/bernie-sanders-i-am- a-democrat-now/.

6 traditional policies of the Democrats. Historically, Sanders has been more on the left than the

Democratic Party. An example of this is taxation. Bernie Sander called for some of the biggest increases in taxes. This was one of the policies the Democratic Party, traditionally, does not support. Obama, during his presidency, cut taxes for the lower and middle classes while making the wealthy pay more. Sanders proposed a 15.3 trillion-dollar tax increase which would raise the rates of everyone, including the middle class.13

Aside from this, Bernie Sanders’s personal relationship with the Democratic Party has not always been friendly. In the late 1980s, Sanders stated that Democrats and Republicans were one party in reality; the party of the ruling class. On another occasion in The New York Times he described the parties as “tweedle-dee” and “tweedle-dum” as both adhered to what Sanders called an “ideology of greed and vulgarity.”14 This all led to the majority of the superdelegates at the convention supporting Clinton instead of Sanders as, according to Paul Starr of The

Atlantic, “A Sanders nomination would be their [Republican Party] opportunity to capture decisive control of all branches of the federal government from a divided and weakened

Democratic Party.”15 Moreover, Sanders would form a threat to the unity of the party and as

Starr concluded, “(…) the costs of purity can be heavy indeed.”16

Ari Berman concluded the same in this 2012 book Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics. In the book, Berman states that, following the 2008 presidential elections, the Democratic Party was divided. There was a divide between the more traditional Democrats and the newer conservative Democrats who came over from the Republican Party. This made policymaking increasingly harder as the conservative

13 Snell, “Sanders Tax Plan Would Raise $15.3 Trillion to Fund New Spending.” 14 Paul Starr, “Bernie Sanders’s Problem With Democrats,” The Atlantic, February 8, 2016, accessed May 27, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/sanderss- party-problem/460293/. 15 Starr, “Bernie Sanders’s Problem With Democrats.” 16 Ibidem.

7 Democrats voted against several White House proposals, which in turn led to disappointment amongst Democratic voters. In the end, the party was split on several important questions as the traditional Democrats supported Obama’s proposals while the conservative Democrats opposed his proposals.17

Another split in 2016 was something Democratic Party leaders tried to prevent at all costs.

Sanders with his, at best, troublesome past with Democrats was clearly not the candidate the party leaders saw as the one to unite the party. After all, the presidential candidate is the face of the party and the main representative of the party. As party leaders simply care about winning the elections, and not only the one for president, it becomes clear why they overwhelmingly chose Clinton to represent the Party. A strong candidate who represents unity would not only stand a better of being elected but would also make it easier for other Democrats to be elected to the Senate or the House of Representatives.18

All these issues of conflicting policies, previous conflicts and electability came to fruition when WikiLeaks released the emails of Democratic National Convention staffers. These emails have shown that the Democratic National Convention was far from neutral during the 2016 presidential primaries. Emails written by prominent Democratic National Convention staffers such as chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz show that the Democratic National

Convention tried to build a negative narrative around Sanders’s campaign while other emails show how Democratic National Convention staffer saw Sanders as a nuisance.19 Sanders and the Democratic Party clearly did not match.

17 Ari Berman, Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics (New York: Picador, 2012), 307. 18 Jamelle Bouie, “The Indispensable Hillary Clinton,” Slate, April 12, 2015, accessed March 4, 2018, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/04/hillary_clinton_s_presid ential_campaign_is_vital_for_the_future_of_the_democratic.html. 19 Theodore Schleifer and Eugene Scott, “What Was in the DNC Email Leak?,” CNN, July 25, 2016, accessed March 6, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/24/politics/dnc-email-leak- wikileaks/index.html.

8 As is thus clear, the media gave plenty of explanations for Sanders’s loss, but what explanations were emphasized? And what media outlet emphasized which explanation? In this thesis, I want to explore which causes the media emphasized and whether their explanations sufficiently took into account the importance of “the invisible primary,” as this aspect is easily overlooked in the “horse race” reporting style which only focuses on the race at hand and the candidates but does not look to the past for context. 20

Especially this last part is of importance as this thesis will state how the media did not give the invisible primary the attention it deserved. The invisible primary, also known as the pre- primary, was a term first coined by Arthur T. Hadley and it described the period that begins sometime between the last election and the start of the next round of primaries. This is the time where the possible candidates check whether they stand a chance to win the presidency and collect as much money as they can.21 In this period, “(…) name recognition, money raised, party insider support and a host of “serious” accomplishments (…) measured success.”22 The fact that Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy a considerable time later than Clinton and the others will have impacted his chances of gathering money, and as is well known, money is one of the most important factors in the run for the presidency. This is precisely where Clinton had her biggest advantage over Sanders.

Sanders also lost the race for media attention during the invisible primary. However, interesting to note here was that, according to research performed by the Shorenstein Center on

Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, Bernie Sanders had the most favorable

20 Kenneth F. Warren, Encyclopedia of U.S. campaigns, elections, and electoral behavior: A- M, Volume 1 (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 307. 21 Kenny J. Whitby, Strategic Decision-making in Presidential Nominations: When and Why Party Elites Decide to Support a Candidate (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 54. 22 Adam H. Johnson, “Bernie Sanders Had to Overcome Media Consensus Around Hillary Clinton,” The New York Times, March 14, 2016, accessed April 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/03/14/has-bernie-sanders-been- underestimated/bernie-sanders-had-to-overcome-media-consensus-around-hillary-clinton.

9 media attention of all candidates.23 This did not help him out much though, since the amount of media attention he did receive was drastically lower than that of Clinton. Sanders, therefore, remained mostly obscure during the invisible primary. In the end, Clinton got the most media attention and gathered the most money and, thus, clearly won the invisible primary This had consequences for Sanders’s eventual campaign as the invisible primary “(…) created an incumbency bias based largely on criteria the Sanders campaign was expressly running against: money and establishment politics.”24 Sanders had to gather vast sums of money and could not do it in the same manner Clinton did by accepting massive donations from Wall Street and other big companies. After all, this was precisely what he ran against. There was also talk of an overemphasis on Clinton’s early successes in gathering money and Superdelegates by the media as political analysts called her campaign a “steamroller” or a “juggernaut” in as early as May

2015. Because the media emphasized Clinton’s successes in gathering money and superdelegates, it seemed as though Clinton had already won the Democratic presidential nomination.25

The style of media reporting also played an important role during the primaries. The media’s main focus, with regards to their reporting on the 2016 primaries, was on the so-called “horse race” between Clinton and Sanders. This means that the media reported on the primaries as a race between Clinton and Sanders and only focused on who was ahead and who was falling

23 Nik DeCosta-Klipa, “This Harvard study both confirms and refutes Bernie Sanders’s complaints about the media,” Boston.com, June 14, 2016, accessed February 24, 2018, https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2016/06/14/harvard-study-confirms-refutes-bernie- sanderss-complaints-media. 24 Adam Johnson, “How the Media Totally Botched the 2016 Primary Coverage,” Alternet, March 26, 2016, accessed February 24, 2018, http://www.alternet.org/media/how-media- totally-botched-2016-primary-coverage. 25 David Byler, “Hillary Clinton’s Grip on the ‘Invisible Primary,’” RealClearPolitics, May 27, 2015, accessed March 5, 2018, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/05/27/hillary_clintons_grip_on_the_invisibl e_primary.html.

10 back. As will be shown, the “horse race” reporting did influence what explanations the media gave for Sanders’s loss.

This will be the focus of this thesis. I will argue that conservative and liberal media focus on different explanations for Sanders’s loss and that through the style of media reporting several important factors in the Vermont senator’s primary defeat, such as the influence of the invisible primary, were not sufficiently explained. The media often overlooked these issues, especially the invisible primary, in explaining a candidate’s success. Part of the reason for this is that these causes are not directly measurable in their effect on the campaign. Nevertheless, they remain important parts of the election cycle as they lay the groundwork for an election.

This thesis uses both primary and secondary sources to support this argument. The primary sources will consist of the newspaper articles. The articles will be from three newspapers: The

New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. These newspapers give a broad perspective as they have audiences which range from more liberal to more conservative.

The New York Times is the most liberal, The Washington Post more in the middle and The Wall

Street Journal more conservative. A close reading of these sources will be combined with a historical contextualization of the media coverage on the basis of secondary sources. Academic studies of the history of the Democratic Party that will provide the necessary background for the evaluation of the media’s response to Sanders’s campaign.

The secondary sources that will be used include, among others, three contributions of

Thomas E. Patterson. In his research, Patterson analyzed the media coverage of the presidential candidates both during the invisible primary and through the actual primaries and caucuses.

Patterson researched how several different media outlets, including those researched in this thesis, portrayed the candidates. In his work, Patterson analyzed both how much coverage each candidate received and whether this coverage was positive, neutral or negative in tone.

Additionally, Patterson researched how much of each candidate’s coverage was focused on

11 issues or on other subjects.26 This thesis will build on his work as it uses Patterson’s analysis as a starting block to explore how the media reported on the presidential primaries.

Ari Berman’s Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party will also be used. Berman adds that, after the 2008 presidential election, Democratic voters lost their trust in politics as Obama failed to deliver on his promises as the Democratic Party was divided.27

This loss of interest and aversion to politicians is important as Sanders ran an insurgent campaign against the establishment in the form of Hillary Clinton. This insurgency campaign was something the media focused on in describing Sanders and his campaign.

Two other books, Party of the People: A History of the Democrats by Jules Whitcover and

The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality by Thomas

Borstelmann explained the developments of American politics. Whitcover explained how the

Democratic Party became the party it is today.28 Borstelmann added that the 1970s were a critical period of change in America and American politics. The two most important aspects of politics were equality and free markets. The Democratic Party would become the party of equality which supported free trade, whereas the Republican Party developed into the party of free trade which supported equality in certain terms. Both parties were similar but the focus of the two parties was different which led to the, now familiar, ideological split between the two parties.29 This thesis will use these two books to show how politics have changed and how the

Democratic Party has developed over the years.

Aside from these more general political books, much has been written on the 2016 presidential elections specifically. The main focus of these works was on the race for the

26 Thomas E. Patterson, “Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race: Trump’s Rise, Sanders’ Emergence, Clinton’s Struggle,” Faculty Research Working Paper Series (June 2016): 7-8. 27 Berman, Herding Donkeys, 318. 28 Jules Witcover, Party of the People (New York: Random House, 2003), XI. 29 Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s a New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality, America in the World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011), 208.

12 presidency between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Previous scholarship specifically focusing on the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries is scarce. This is mainly because it is a very recent event. Most scholarship that exists focuses on the media coverage of the primaries.

Research has already been done on the overall reporting of the media on the presidential candidates.30 This thesis will do more than this and analyze the differences between not only the amount of reporting of the media and whether this was positive or negative. This research will also show how different types of media explained the loss of Bernie Sanders.

This research is important as the media has great influence on the public and more specifically on the perceptions and ideas of this public. This also means that the media influenced the public’s opinions regarding Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and played a role in framing the 2016 presidential primaries. The results of this thesis will show if there are any differences between Liberal and Conservative media outlets with regards to what explanations they emphasized. The result of this research will be a balanced overview and analysis of the media’s handling of the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. On top of this, as mentioned before, more attention has to be given to the roles the invisible primary and the party establishment as they lay the groundwork for every candidate’s campaign. This thesis seeks to fill this void in research to the 2016 presidential primaries.

30 Thomas Patterson’s work on the media coverage of the presidential primaries will be used in this thesis as the basis for analyzing the media coverage of the 2016 presidential nomination race.

13 Chapter 1: Sanders’s Primary Race and Media reporting

On the 26th of May 2015, Bernie Sanders officially declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. From this moment on, the media would play an important role in his campaign. As an experienced politician, Sanders knew how to handle himself in the media. A big difference now was that the amount of media attention would be much higher for a long period of time. This, next to the fact that his policies are closest to those of the Democrats, explained why he ran as a Democrat as running as an independent would give him a much smaller media platform to run on. Running as a Democrat meant more media exposure for Sanders through, for example, televised debates.31

American media would use many frameworks to describe Sanders during his campaign.

For example, in the early stages of his campaign, the media portrayed Sanders as a protest candidate and as one who did not really stand a chance to win the nomination.32 A broader frame that the media used to report on elections is that of the “Horse race.” Here, the election is presented as a race between the candidates and the focus is on who is ahead and who is falling behind. This meant that Sanders’s campaign, which focused on income, wealth equality, and campaign financing, got less attention than himself.

Sanders’s media coverage differed radically from that of Clinton. On social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram his campaign garnered a lot of attention. Especially his younger followers were active on these type of sites, earning the nickname the

31 Ralph Nader, “Ralph Nader: Why Bernie Sanders Was Right to Run as a Democrat,” Washington Post, March 25, 2016, accessed April 27, 2017, sec. PostEverything, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/03/25/ralph-nader-why- bernie-sanders-was-right-to-run-as-a-democrat/. 32 “Bernie Sanders 2016 Presidential Election Candidate” NBC News, accessed April 22, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/candidates/bernie-sanders.

14 “Berniebros.”33 Hillary Clinton got more exposure through the traditional media. This can partly be explained by looking at campaign financing. Clinton got her money through super

PACs. Sanders, in contrast to Clinton, never made use of a super PAC and instead gathered most of his donations through individual donations. The use of these super PACs allowed

Clinton to gather significantly more money than Sanders. However, Sanders still managed to gather significant amounts of money.34 Even though Sanders gathered significant amounts of money, he still had to rely on free media attention much more so than Clinton as she had more money to spend on commercials. Exactly these conventional media outlets, especially in the early days of his campaign, did not pay much attention to Sanders and his campaign. This became clear when WikiLeaks accused The New York Times of minimizing their coverage of

Sanders during the primaries.35

This chapter will give an introduction to media reporting during the time of presidential elections with a focus on Sanders’s campaign. Additionally, this first chapter will also cover

Sanders’s overall media coverage during the invisible primary in 2015 and the “real” primary in 2016.

1.1 Media Framing of the Primaries

It is a well-known fact that the media has an impact on presidential elections. In the 2016 primaries, this was no different. The media, to an extent, determined the information that the

33 Robinson Meyer “Here Comes the Berniebro: The Young, Male, and Earnest Bernie Sanders Supporters” The Atlantic, October 17, 2015, accessed April 24, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/here-comes-the-berniebro-bernie- sanders/411070/. 34 “Bernie Sanders 2016 Presidential Election Candidate” 35 Michael Sainato, “WikiLeaks: New York Times Propped Up Clinton, Subverted Sanders” Observer, October 13, 2016, accessed April 22, 2017, http://observer.com/2016/10/wikileaks-new-york-times-propped-up-clinton-subverted- sanders/.

15 public receives and decided how much attention each of the candidates received. Aside from the amount of attention the media gave to the candidates, the media also decided what kind of information they would give and, more importantly, how they presented this information. In other words, the media framed the information they spread in a certain way. American sociologist Todd Gitlin defined media frames as “persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual.”36 This framing of the news can, thus, eliminate certain thoughts on the subject and weaken other arguments. The media, by doing this, framed the news in a certain way that favored one side over the other without showing a particular bias on the subject at hand.37

Framing is, thus, not the same as bias. Framing differs from bias in two important ways.

First, framing is much more sophisticated than bias and, therefore, harder to recognize as the power of framing comes from the media’s ability to control the debate without the audience taking notice of it. Framing, therefore, is more complicated than simply being a proponent or opponent of an issue. It is more complicated because it adds emotional responses, a cognitive dimension, beliefs, and attitudes towards a subject. Second, framing uses the importance and influence of media writing and media presentation to deliver its message. In this way, it defines situations and issues to set the terms for a debate. This defining of situations and issues for a subject of discussion has consequences for the emotions and sets of values it brings up. An example given by communication scholar James W. Tankard Jr. shows this. Tankard gives the example of how abortion could be framed in different ways. On the one hand, abortion can be framed as the killing of a child but on the other hand, abortion can also be framed as an issue

36 Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 7. 37 James W. Tankard Jr., “The Empirical Approach to the Study of Media Framing,” in Framing public life: Perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world, ed. Stephen D. Reese, Oscar H. Gandy, Jr, and August E. Grant (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2001), 95.

16 that is primarily concerned with a women’s freedom of choice.38 Both frames called upon radically different sets of values and emotions and would lead to different arguments and conclusions in the debate.

A step further than a media frame is a media hegemony. One speaks of a media hegemony when a frame is so dominant that people accept it without noticing it or questioning it. This is the ultimate goal of both politicians and news outlets as this means that your set of values and emotions has been deemed as the rightful one. Additionally, this also means that the debate is won as the majority of the people have deemed your frame as the rightful one. 39

The question remains what provides the news media with a framework to present events.

According to professor Robert A. Hackett, ideology is this provider.40 In political news, reporting ideology plays an especially important role. With the vast ideological differences between the two dominant parties in American politics, it is no surprise that framing often occurs. According to Hackett, framing is something that can unintentionally occur as it may be the result of the “(…) unconscious absorption of assumptions about the social world in which the news must be embedded in order to be intelligible to its intended audience.”41 This, to an extent, explains the differences between how liberal and conservative media choose to present their information.

In politics, there is a specific frame media outlets use when they are reporting on the presidential primaries. This frame is called the “horse race narrative.” Horse race reporting is

“(…) a narrative-framing device that shapes what’s covered, and how electoral events and candidates are interpreted in the news.”42 The term “horse race” refers to the tendency of

38 Tankard Jr, “The Empirical Approach to the Study of Media Framing,” 96. 39 Ibidem, 96. 40 Robert A. Hackett, “Decline of Paradigm? Bias and Objectivity in News Media Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1, no. 3 (1984): 246. 41 Hackett, 248. 42 Warren, Encyclopedia of U.S. campaigns, elections, and electoral behavior, 307.

17 journalists to write about the primaries as a race between the candidates. This style of media reporting dominates contemporary electoral news reporting since the 1912 primaries. In these primaries, for the first time, there were significant numbers of delegates elected. As a result, multiple candidates had a chance to run in the primaries. This had the consequence that the individual candidates, rather than the national party, took an active role in running the primaries.

Candidates now had to attract media attention in order to stand a chance to win the nomination.43

“Horse race” reporting got big in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the first elections where the media made use of “horse race” reporting was the presidential election of 1976, where

Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Republican Gerald Ford.44

The main aspect of “horse race” reporting is that the candidates are judged in comparison to the other candidates, or as author C. Anthony Broh states, “A horse is judged not by its absolute speed or skill but in comparison to the speed of other horses, and especially by its wins and losses.”45 This focus on the candidates, and the comparison between them, has created five main storylines in “horse race” reporting that the media used in the 2016 elections. There was the “leading” candidate, the “trailing” candidate, the “gaining ground” candidate, the “losing ground” candidate, and the “likely loser” candidate.46

Each of these storylines had their own unique aspects. The “gaining ground” candidate had the most positive storyline. In this storyline, the growing momentum, the rise in the polls and the growing crowds this candidate attracts were the main focus. Aside from these positive stories, there were also some negative elements to this narrative. These negative elements focused mainly on the tactics the candidate used to gain momentum. Opposite to the “gaining

43 Kathleen E. Kendall, Communication in the Presidential Primaries: Candidates and the Media, 1912-2000 (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000), 7. 44 Warren, Encyclopedia of U.S. campaigns, elections, and electoral behavior, 307. 45 C. Anthony Broh, “Horse-Race Journalism: Reporting the Polls in the 1976 Presidential Election,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 44, No. 4 (1980): 515. 46 Patterson, “Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race,” 7-8.

18 ground” candidate, the “likely loser” candidate was the most negative storyline. In this storyline, all the weaknesses of the candidate came to the fore and were much more emphasized than in any other narrative. This narrative was also called the “as-good-as-over” storyline as the media stopped giving attention to this candidate. The “losing ground” narrative was a slightly less negative narrative than the “likely loser” storyline. In this narrative, the main focus was on the possible reason for the candidate’s fall. The main components here were the decline in the candidate’s fortunes, the cause of the decline, and the candidate’s efforts to recover from his fall. In this storyline, there were no positive elements. The final two storylines were that of the

“leading candidate” and the “trailing” candidate. In the Democratic race, Clinton was the

“leading” candidate in almost all of the polls. This had the effect that news reporting on Clinton, for the most part, was negative. Clinton was mainly critiqued for how she took the lead through her ties to Wall Street. The “trailing” candidate storyline was again more negative than the

“gaining ground” narrative and focused more on the reasons why this candidate was trailing.47

This constant focus on the candidates and their race had grave consequences as media outlets started shifting their attention away from in-depth discussions on political issues and focused more on the candidates themselves.48 Through this, journalists only highlighted those strengths and weaknesses of the candidates that fitted well within this type of writing.

Additionally, reporters who adopted this strategy of reporting had the tendency to interpret everything the candidate was doing as a strategy to win the race. This ranged from the candidate giving a speech at a school, which the media would interpret as the candidate trying to win over the young voters, to a candidate changing his or her hairstyle to appeal more to older voters.

Media outlets, thus, solely focused on how a candidate was doing in the elections. In other words, who was ahead and who was falling back in the race.49

47 Ibidem, 7-8. 48 Warren, Encyclopedia of U.S. campaigns, elections, and electoral behavior, 307. 49 Ibidem, 307.

19 Polls played an important role in “horse race” reporting. Polls, in a way, fed “horse race” reporting. This was because polls supplied journalists with the data of who was in the lead and who was not. Through the use of polls, it became clear who was doing well and who was not doing so well. The one thing the polls did not tell is why this candidate was doing well or why the other candidate was losing. This was where the journalists had to explain the poll results.

Reporters were left free in explaining the why’s; their only constraint was that what they say would have to resonate with the polls. However, in the “horse race,” the focus was on the candidates and all explanations for why a candidate was in the lead or not would center on what he or she was doing.50 Or, as scholar Thomas E. Patterson put it: “If a candidate is lagging in the polls, the problem must lie with the candidate’s personality or game plan.”51

Another advantage of polls was that every aspect of the race was brought in a format that showed a development in the race. Approval polls, which measured public support for a candidate, were the best example of this. Approval rates had the tendency to shift throughout the race and could be placed in a graph as time progressed which showed an overall trend and can make for predictions.52

1.2 Sanders’s Horse Race during the invisible primary

As a presidential candidate, Sanders was part of this electoral “horse race.” In terms of the five main storylines of the “horse race” framework, Bernie Sanders, during the invisible primary, fit that of the “gaining ground” candidate. This is remarkable as, during the early phases of this part of the campaign, he was in the column of the “likely loser” candidates. Sanders’s campaign followed the path of the candidate who the media ruled out from the start but managed to make

50 Thomas E. Patterson, “Of Polls, Mountains: U.S. Journalists And Their Use Of Election Surveys,” Public Opinion Quarterly 69, No. 5 (Spring 2005): 721. 51 Patterson, “Of Polls, Mountains,” 721. 52 Ibidem, 721.

20 a miraculous comeback as time progressed. This switch of storylines led to Sanders having more media attention as it made for a good comeback story which is always popular. In turn, this increased media attention strengthened Sanders’s comeback. Clinton was in the category of the “leading” candidate throughout the invisible primary and this had the effect that her media coverage was much more negative than that of Sanders.53

A series of papers called The Faculty Working Paper Series, written by Thomas E.

Patterson of the Harvard Kenney School, researched not only the amount of attention that

Sanders got during the primaries and how much of this attention was positive. In his research,

Patterson analyzed eight media outlets—CBS, Fox, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, The New York

Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.54 Interesting to note here is that the Democratic race did not garner a whole lot of media attention. This was because the Democratic primary was not a race at all in the early stages as Clinton led Sanders by 60 percentage points at the start of the invisible primary. This changed when Sanders started gaining on Clinton. When Sanders had closed the gap to 25 percentage points, the Democratic race received a lot more media attention.55 Headlines such as “Bernie Sanders gaining on

Hillary Clinton in crucial South Carolina” and “Sanders gaining ground on Clinton, in echoes of 2008” grazed the covers of newspapers and websites.56

The early lack of coverage was especially bad for Sanders, as he was the candidate who had to come from behind. As stated before, Sanders refused to accept donations from super

53 Patterson, “Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race,” 7. 54 Ibidem, 4. 55 Ibidem, 11. 56 Ben Wolfgang “Bernie Sanders Gaining Crucial Ground over Clinton in South Carolina,” Washington Times, January 14, 2016, accessed April 22, 2017, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jan/14/bernie-sanders-gaining-crucial- ground-over-clinton/. And “Sanders Gaining Ground on Clinton, in Echoes of 2008, Fox News, January 15, 2016, accessed April 20, 2017, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01/15/sanders-gaining-ground-on-clinton-in- echoes-2008.html.

21 PACs. This had the consequence that he had less money to spend on commercials and Sanders was, therefore, more reliant on the free attention the media gave him. As Sanders’s campaign gathered speed and managed to lose the “likely loser” frame, he garnered a lot more media attention.

A positive note for Sanders was that the media attention he did get was more positive than that of any other candidate.57 Especially in the early goings of his campaign, the attention

Sanders received was overwhelmingly positive. This fitted his transition from a “likely loser” candidate to a “gaining ground” candidate. An overall analysis of Sanders’s campaign shows that his reporting was positive all the way through the invisible primary. The research done by

Patterson, as shown in figure 1, showed that the tone of Sanders’s coverage

57 Patterson, “Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race,” 16.

22 Graph 158

was neutral through April, with a dip in May. From June 2015 through September 2015 there was a spike in news with a positive tone regarding Sanders. This reached a peak in

September, indicating that Sanders made the transition to a “gaining ground” candidate during this time. After September, there was a harsh decline in positive news reporting regarding

Sanders. In December, Sanders news reporting hit an all-time low during the invisible primary.

This was the period where Sanders switched from a “gaining ground” candidate to a “trailing” candidate. This storyline was a lot less positive than that of the “gaining ground” candidate. 59

Interesting to note is that in Sanders’s months of decline, October, November and

December, the first debates between Sanders and his competitors were held. In these debates, the fight was mainly between Clinton and Sanders, with Clinton coming out on top most of the

58 Patterson’s research measured the positive coverage against the negative coverage in Sanders news reporting, while leaving out the neutral toned news. Patterson, “Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race,” 13. 59 Ibidem, 13.

23 time. Other candidates such as Jim Webb, Martin O’Malley, and Lincoln Chaffee did not play a role of significance. In the fight between Clinton and Sanders, either Clinton came out victorious or there was a tie. Sanders’s poor performance during the debates is a possible explanation for his dropping positive references in the media. 60

Another important aspect of the news coverage is what percentage of that news is dedicated to issues and what percentage of the reporting on those issues is negative in tone.

Patterson’s analysis showed that seven percent of the coverage of Sanders was devoted to issues. This was the lowest out of all the presidential candidates. There was, however, also a positive point for Sanders. Seventeen percent of Sanders’s coverage of the issues was negative.

This is by far the lowest out of all the candidates, with Ted Cruz coming in second with 32 percent of his coverage on issues being negative.61

The overall conclusion that can be drawn from Sanders’s invisible primary news coverage is that he did not garner a whole lot of attention until the very end of this stage of the election. The news coverage that he did receive was the most positive of all the candidates, with the exception of the month of December 2015 where his news coverage, for the first time, was decidedly more negative than positive. This media process laid the groundwork for the “real” primaries that started at the beginning of 2016.

1.3 Sanders and the Media during the 2016 Primaries

After Sanders’s stronger than expected performance in the invisible primary season, it was the question whether he could continue his strong campaign during the voting season. A nice boost for Sanders was that he now had a higher favorability rating than Clinton. A Gallup poll of

60 Connie Cass, “Meet the Candidates in Tonight’s First Democratic Debate,” PBS NewsHour, October 13, 2015, accessed April 26, 2017, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/quick- guide-democratic-2016-candidates. 61 Patterson, “Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race,” 16.

24 February 2016 noted that Sanders had a favorable rating of 53, as opposed to that of Clinton who scored a 49.62 U.S. adults who identified themselves or leaned towards the Democrats were taken up in this Gallup Poll. The negative media attention given to Sanders in December 2015, thus, did not impact his popularity among traditionally Democratic voters. However, Sanders would still have to prove his worth during the race.

The election process is complicated because of the differences in types of caucuses and primaries. As a start, there is the difference between a caucus and a primary. Most states choose for the primary. The primary closely resembles a general election. During the primary, voters cast their vote to determine who will be the presidential candidate. What complicates a primary is that it can be open or closed. In open primaries, a voter can cast his or her vote for either candidate of either party. In closed primaries, only registered voters who are affiliated with a party can cast their vote. Registered Republicans can, thus, only vote for Republicans and registered Democrats can only vote for Democratic candidates. Independent voters, voters who are not affiliated with any of the parties, cannot cast their vote during these primaries.63

A caucus is more complicated than a primary where one simply casts a vote. Caucuses are more time-consuming as there are discussions about candidates, voters pick convention delegates and the attendants discus state party business. The advantage of a caucus is that the state party is directly in charge of the process instead of the state and the local government. In the 2016 presidential run, both caucuses and primaries were used to divide the delegates between the candidates. 64

62 Frank Newport, “Clinton’s Image Among Democrats at New Low,” Gallup, April 14, 2016, accessed June 22, 2017, http://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/190787/clinton- image-among-democrats-new-low.aspx. 63 Josh Clark, “How Political Primaries Work,” HowStuffWorks, January 28, 2008, accessed June 8, 2016, https://people.howstuffworks.com/primary.htm. 64 “What Is a Caucus and How Does It Work?, ”Fox News, January 17, 2016, accessed March 4, 2018, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01/18/what-is-caucus-and-how-does-it- work.html.

25 The influence of early caucus and primary results have garnered a tremendous amount of scholarly attention. From 1972 on, changes made by the McGovern-Fraser mandate of 1970 led to the primaries attracting more media attention. The mandate intended to give more power to grassroots party members of the Democratic Party and take power away from the party elites in Washington D.C. These changes were made to make the Party more appealing to voters and the party had to make changes after losing the election to Richard Nixon and the Republicans in 1968. An unintended result of this was a tremendous increase in the amounts of primaries and caucuses, also for the Republican Party who followed along the same path.65

Conventional wisdom holds that the results of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary have the most impact on the outcome of the primaries. However, recent scholarship has challenged this impact. More recent scholarship states that the invisible primary is more important due to the importance of fundraising and organization-building.66 What scholars do agree on is that a good showing in Iowa and New Hampshire is important as wins here get more media attention than wins in any other state. Moreover, wins in Iowa and New Hampshire also attract the necessary money to continue one’s campaign at a high level. It is, however, not true that a win in Iowa or New Hampshire guarantees the presidency, or the other way around, that a loss in Iowa or New Hampshire means the race is over. But this does not mean that a good showing in these two states is not important, on the contrary, an extremely poor showing in these states can ruin a presidential run as was the case with Al Gore who all but ignored Iowa and New Hampshire in his run for the presidency.67

65 Lawrence Leduc, “Democratizing Party Leadership Selection,” Party Politics 7, No. 3 (2001): 327. 66 Randalle E. Adkins and Andrew J. Dowdle, “How Important Are Iowa and New Hampshire to Winning Post-Reform Presidential Nominations?,” Political Research Quarterly 54, No. 2, (2001): 432. 67 Adkins and Dowdle, “How Important Are Iowa and New Hampshire to Winning Post-Reform Presidential Nominations?,” 437.

26 Additionally, research done by Randall E. Adkins, a professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and Andrew J. Dowdle, a professor at Fayetteville State University, shows that the results of the New Hampshire primary have a bigger effect than those from Iowa on the race. It has also become clear in this research that the momentum created through a victory in Iowa or

New Hampshire only helps those candidates who are not in the lead to dispose of other such candidates.68 Additionally, where Adkins and Dowdle state that the Iowa caucuses and New

Hampshire primary can only boost the chances of those candidates who are not in the lead,

Hugh Winebrenner and Dennis J. Goldford state that Iowa only holds the power to “break” candidates as they claim that, “Although the Iowa caucuses may no longer be able to “make” dark-horse presidential candidacies in the present environment, they still “break” them.”69

The first real test of Sanders’s chances was to be measured in the month of February. In this month, there were caucuses in Iowa and Nevada. Additionally, there were primaries in New

Hampshire and South Carolina to close out the month of February. As Sanders’s performance in the early caucuses and primaries was above expectations, it helped his chances of winning the nomination. As stated before, Sanders narrowly lost to Clinton in the Iowa caucuses and defeated her convincingly in the New Hampshire primary, only to lose the Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primary. In the end, this meant that Clinton had a lead of 91 delegates over

Sanders’s 65 delegates.70

These results directly affected the media reporting on Sanders. In Sanders’s case, the media was overall more positive than negative in describing Sanders following his strong showing in the month of February. This is because he performed better than the media expected him to.

The overall analysis shows that Sanders took up 46 percent of the media coverage concerning

68 Ibidem, 442. 69 Hugh Winebrenner and Dennis J. Goldford, The Iowa Precinct Caucuses: The Making of a Media Event, Third Edition (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 343. 70 Andrews, Bennett, and Parlapiano, “2016 Delegate Count and Primary Results.”

27 the Democratic candidates. Of this 46 percent, 59 percent was positive news. Sanders, thus, continued his trend of positive media attention and was again the candidate with the most positive news surrounding him.71 It can be concluded that Iowa and New Hampshire helped

Sanders’s campaign as they have done for other dark-horse presidential candidates as his better- than-expected result increased his media coverage and it gave him more positive media attention.

After the initial caucuses and primaries of February, the race would pick up. Super Tuesday was to be the next big measuring moment for Sanders’s chances at the presidency. On Super

Tuesday, twelve states held their primary or caucuses.72 This important stage of the race would prove to be difficult for Sanders. Not only would he see the gap with Clinton grow to 191 delegates after Super Tuesday, in the following primaries and caucuses in this middle stage of the election this would grow to 201 delegates.73 Despite Sanders’s losses, the news coverage of him stayed the same during this period: less media coverage than Clinton, but also more news with a positive tone.74

The middle stage of the primaries was once again a difficult period for Sanders. Not only did he see Clinton’s lead grow, the media also, for the first time during his campaign, was more negative than positive in describing Sanders and his campaign. This can mainly be attributed to the fact that Sanders now lost his “gaining ground” candidate status and fell back to the “likely loser” candidate, while Clinton strengthened her position as the “leading” candidate which led to positive media coverage. As indicated before, the “likely loser” storyline is a lot more negative than the “gaining ground” narrative. What did remain consistent was

71 Thomas E. Patterson, “News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Primaries: Horse Race Reporting Has Consequences,” Faculty Research Working Paper Series (December 2016): 12 72 Patterson, “News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Primaries,” 13. 73 Andrews, Bennett, and Parlapiano, “2016 Delegate Count and Primary Results.” 74 Patterson, “News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Primaries,” 16.

28 Sanders’s lack of media attention. During this middle part of the race, Sanders only acquired

39 percent of the Democratic candidate news coverage.75

The last stage of the 2016 primaries would put the final nail in the coffin for Sanders’s campaign. Clinton’s victories in California, New Jersey, South Dakota and New Mexico gave her enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination.76 Media coverage on Sanders was, once again, more negative than positive and he once again received less media attention. The media attention focused on his defeats in the state primaries and caucuses, and his vanishing shot at the Democratic nomination. There was, however, positive news reporting on his character and issue positions, making him the only candidate to do this throughout the campaign.77

In the end, Sanders’s campaign has walked along the path scholars predicted. His good showing in Iowa and New Hampshire did not bring Sanders the nomination. However, Adkins and Dowdle were right in their assessment of increased media coverage after a good showing in Iowa and New Hampshire. The 2016 primary season for Sanders can be summarized as follows: continuing positive media attention, yet still not enough media attention. An overall analysis shows that, throughout the 24 weeks of the 2016 primary, Sanders constantly trailed

Clinton in the percentage of the news coverage. The difference now was that the gap between

Sanders and Clinton was not as big as it was in 2015. Sanders, however, did get the most media attention of all the “trailing candidates,” most likely because he was the only real threat to

Clinton. The next aspect journalists would focus on was explaining the reasons behind

Sanders’s loss.

75 Ibidem, 19. 76 Shane Goldmacher, “‘History Made’: Clinton Claims Nomination,” Politico, June 7, 2016, accessed June 17, 2017, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/clinton-wins-new-jersey- democratic-primary-224034. 77 Patterson, “News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Primaries,” 23.

29 Chapter 2: Explaining Sanders’s Loss

Throughout the presidential “horse race”, U.S. media outlets have been explaining why Clinton or Sanders was in the lead. The real explanations for Sanders’s loss came when it was clear that

Hillary Clinton would win the Democratic nomination. As can be expected, the explanations for his loss were wide-ranging. There were, of course, also some explanations that all newspapers mentioned in their reporting on the primaries. Of importance to note is that the newspapers, with a few exceptions, did not write articles that were solely focused on explaining

Sanders’s loss. Most of the times, articles that document the overall progress of his campaign gave explanations for his losses and it is explained why Sanders did not win a certain primary or caucus in one or more states. Other explanations came when a journalist reviewed Sanders’s campaign and his mistakes or missed opportunities were mentioned. Bigger, reflecting articles on his performance in the primaries were few and far in between.

The newspapers that will be analyzed in this chapter are The New York Times, The

Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. There are several reasons why these newspapers have been chosen. One of the reasons is their different political leaning. The New York Times is the most liberal of the three. Slightly more to the centrist side is The Washington Post and

The Wall Street Journal is the more conservative newspaper. These newspapers have been chosen as, through analyzing these three newspapers, all political leanings in the United States are represented. Another reason is that these newspapers are among the most popular and biggest newspapers in the United States.

The reason why not more newspapers will be analyzed is that these three newspapers will provide more than enough data to analyze. A total of more 1,000 articles have been written about the election in the period that will be analyzed. As the results will show, these three newspapers, broadly, give the same explanations the same amount of attention. Adding more newspapers to add more data will not change this.

30 Articles from these newspapers have been analyzed in the period of February 1, 2016, until August 1, 2016. These dates have been chosen as the first primaries started in February and the Democratic National Convention of 2016 was held from July 26 until July 28.

Furthermore, only newspaper articles have been chosen, articles from the websites of the different newspapers have been left out as the articles published in the newspapers are the most important ones and proved to be sufficient in analyzing the newspapers. The website

Factiva.com was used to access the newspapers. The search word ‘Sanders’ was used to filter out the articles that did not mention his name. One could argue that articles on Clinton’s success that do not mention Sanders’s name are not incorporated in the result, but since there are very few articles like this, it does not impact the results.

What is of importance in this analysis is that only the explanations of the newspapers are counted. Newspapers often quoted Bernie Sanders on his explanations on why he lost a certain caucus or primary. Sanders, for example, claimed that the Democratic National

Convention boycotted his campaign far before WikiLeaks released the emails. Even though this is an explanation for his loss, the newspapers presented it as speculation and not as an explanation for Sanders’s loss and it is, therefore, not weighed as an explanation. Therefore, only when the writers of the news article explain Sanders’s loss it is counted in the results.

This chapter will analyze how the three mentioned newspapers explained the loss of

Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. In addition, it will compare the different explanations the three newspapers gave. As will be shown, Sanders’s struggle to win the minority vote and the role of the DNC are emphasized most by all three newspapers.

2.1 Overall analysis

An overall analysis of the newspapers shows that the media presented eight explanations for

Sanders’s loss. The explanations that the newspapers gave were Sanders’s inability to win the

31 minority vote, Sanders’s disliked policies, Sanders’s poor campaign planning, Sanders’s problems with fitting in the Democratic Party, Sanders’s inability to beat Trump in the general election, Sanders not winning the women vote, Sanders’s lack of experience, and, finally, older

Democrats voting for Clinton. As graph 1 shows, two explanations that far outweigh the other ones are Sanders’s inability to win the minority vote and his troubles with the Democratic Party during the primary season. Next, will follow an in-depth look at the explanations given by the three newspapers.

Graph 2

EXPLANATIONS SANDERS LOSS IN PRIMARIES 02/01/2016-08/01/2016

35 33

30 25 25 25 20 20 New York Times 14 15 Washington Post 11 Wall Street Journal 10 5 4 4 5 3 3 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 Minority Policy Campaign Party Fight vs Women Sanders Older Vote Planning troubles Trump lacks Democrats experience

32 2.2 The Minority Vote

In the Democratic primary, the minorities are the most coveted group. As Dahleen Glanton of

The Chicago Tribune stated on February 15, 2016:

This stage [primaries and caucuses after Iowa and New Hampshire in the South]

can make or break a campaign because black voters, particularly in the South,

get to use the power granted to them every four years to lift the future

presidential nominee to the top of the heap, leaving the others staggering in the

dust.78

The minority group in this research consists mainly of blacks and Latinos as they are the biggest minority groups in the United States. As can be seen in Graph 1, all newspapers show high numbers in using the minority vote as an explanation for Sanders’s struggles and eventual loss.

Sanders especially struggled to get the “black vote.” The reasons the newspapers gave for this were wide-ranging. In a New York Times article of March 22nd, Noam Scheiber and Giovanni

Russonello explained why.79 The main reason Scheiber and Russonello gave for this is the economy. African-Americans have experienced better economic trends in recent years, compared to white Americans. In recent years, income for blacks, in their 30’s through 50’s, has risen faster than whites in this age group. Additionally, minorities find economic growth more important than anything else. As Mrs. Clinton’s campaign focused more on economic growth, it becomes clear why minorities picked her over Sanders.

78 Dahleen Glanton, “The Fight for Black Voters Is on in the Democratic Presidential Race,” Chicago Tribune, February 15, 2016, accessed June 17, 2017, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-sanders-minority-vote-glanton-talk- column.html. 79 Noam Scheiber and Giovanni Russonello, “Why Clinton Is Ahead Of Sanders With Blacks.”

33 Another reason, according to the reporters, was that Clinton had history on her side.

History came in the form of her husband, former president Bill Clinton. The former president had built up a respectable reputation with the African-American community during his presidency and his wife looked to continue on this path. Aside from this, Hillary Clinton’s closeness to then-president Barack Obama also helped her win over the African-American community. Obama still is immensely popular among African-Americans and Clinton has defended Obama’s policies on the campaign trail, whereas Sanders was more critical of the former president. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the perfect example of this. Sanders stated that the ACA did not go far enough and proposed a single-payer system. Clinton, on the other hand, defended the ACA ruthlessly. As a result, black Americans viewed Clinton “(…) as having a more instinctive identification with Obama.''80

Sanders did try to find a connection with the black community in the United States. As

Phil Rucker, Robert Costa, and John Wagner of The Wall Street Journal reported on July 6,

2016, this never really came to fruition. The reporters stated how it was difficult for Sanders to form a connection as he comes from a state, Vermont, that is rural and 95% white.81 In short, the communities he had to win over, could not be more different than his own community. Gilda

Cobb-Hunter, an African-American state Senator from South Carolina, summarized Sanders’s struggles best:

I saw him speak, and he didn't slow down. He didn't read his audience - body

language, faces, a certain cadence. No slowing down to receive or acknowledge

80 Ibidem. 81 Philip Rucker, Robert Costa, and John Wagner, “Doing Great Too Late,” The Washington Post, June 6, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. A-Section, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523010462051033105590911 871663.

34 affirmation or an 'Amen' here or there. He was brusque. He didn't appear to feel

comfortable - and it showed.82

What Sanders should have done instead, was emphasize his own history with civil rights. This would have made for some common ground between Sanders and African-Americans. But he did not do this enough and started too late. A final reason for Sanders’ inability to win the minority vote was his low rate of name-recognition among this group. Because of this, Sanders could not catch on to Clinton’s early lead and failed to win over this group of voters as they simply did not know who he was and what he stood for. 83

2.3 Party Troubles

The category party troubles led the way in explaining Sanders’s loss in all three newspapers.

This category is made up of three subcategories as they all have to do with the Democratic

Party’s negative impact on Sanders’s campaign. As Graph 2 shows, these three subcategories are the role superdelegates played during the election, the negative role the Democratic National

Convention had during the presidential primaries and, finally, the role closed primaries played during the nomination process.

82 Rucker, Costa, and Wagner, “Doing Great Too Late.” 83 Ibidem.

35 Graph 3 PARTY TROUBLES 25

20 20

15 13 13 New York Times 11 Washington Post 10 10 Wall Street Journal

5 5 5 4 2

0 Superdelegates Role DNC Closed Primaries

The first problem for Sanders with the Democratic Party were the superdelegates.

Interesting to note is that The New York Times gave this explanation considerably less attention than both The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal did. The two articles from The

New York Times that mentioned the role superdelegates played were titled “How Delegate Rules

Explain Your Political Party” and “Clinton Reaches Historic Mark, A.P. Says.” The former described how Clinton had a major lead among the superdelegates which gave her a sense of invincibility and how, should there have been a tie in pledged delegates, the superdelegates would have highly likely given Clinton the final boost towards reaching the Democratic nomination.84 The latter described how the superdelegates gave Clinton enough total delegates

84 Toni Monkovic, “How Delegate Rules Explain Your Political Party,” The New York Times, March 17, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523.

36 to win the nomination.85 Articles from The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post followed this line of reporting but simply mentioned it significantly more than The New York

Times.

The newspapers also explained why these superdelegates chose to endorse Clinton. A

May 5, 2016, Washington Post article by Ed O’Keefe and John Wagner titled “Sanders faces tough sell in getting superdelegates to switch” stated that the superdelegates had supported who they thought would win the election. As the primary season progressed and Clinton had a lead in pledged delegates, more and more superdelegates pledged their vote for Clinton.86 This made it so that Clinton was always in the lead, even after Sanders’s impressive early victories.

Additionally, many of the superdelegates supported Clinton as she was the establishment nominee and because she had personal relations with them.87

Second, there is the negative role the Democratic National Convention played in the

Sanders campaign. The role the Democratic National Convention played in the election came to light with the release of more than 190,000 emails that were posted on the WikiLeaks website. These emails showed how Democratic National Convention staffers tried to undermine

Sanders’s campaign.88 As Graph 2 shows, counted together, this is the category that the newspapers put the most emphasis on. This can, however, have multiple reasons and does not simply mean that the newspapers thought this the main reason for Sanders’s loss.

85 Amy Chozick, “Clinton Reaches Historic Mark, A.P. Says,” The New York Times, June 7, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523007316882079633562377 98035. 86 Ed O’Keefe and John Wagner, “Sanders Faces Tough Sell in Getting Superdelegates to Switch,” The Washington Post, May 5, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. A-Section, https://global- factiva-com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=152. 87 Monkovic, “How Delegate Rules Explain Your Political Party.” 88 Harriet Torry, “The Democratic Convention: Emails Reveal Democratic Discord,” The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2016, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523010821524097312276497 74076.

37 As the release of the emails was by far the most surprising and shocking event during the end of the primaries, it is not surprising that newspapers gave the most attention to this aspect of Sanders’s troubles with the Democratic Party. Mixed in with the Russians being responsible for the hack that made the release of the emails possible, it is not surprising that the role of the Democratic National Convention was mentioned most in the category party troubles.

The fact that articles mention the effect of the emails on Sanders’s campaign in articles that put the focus on another subject, such as the dangers of Russian hacking actions, shows this.89

Additionally, an important note is that all three newspapers emphasized the Democratic

National Convention working against Sanders less as an explanation for his loss than, for example, Sanders’s inability to win the minority vote. This is because it is next to impossible to judge how big the impact on the Sanders campaign was. Especially since his campaign was more successful than anyone predicted.

Nonetheless, all of the analyzed newspapers agreed that the DNC negatively impacted the Sanders campaign. Therefore, it should still be seen as an important factor in Sanders’s loss, especially as the leaked emails showed how the Democratic National Convention had always wanted Clinton as their nominee for the 2016 presidential race. An article in The Washington

Post by Dan Balz titled “Leaked emails aside, the DNC has been a long-standing problem” stated that the DNC had failed in its role as “(…) The DNC appeared to have its finger on the scale for rival Hillary Clinton through the long nominating contest.”90 The New York Times and

The Wall Street Journal both reached the same conclusions in separate articles.

89 Editorial Board, “Russia’s Motives for Meddling,” The Washington Post, July 26, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. Editorial-Opinion, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523007088334006916616089 815353. 90 Dan Balz, “Leaked Emails aside, the DNC Has Been a Long-Standing Problem,” The Washington Post, July 25, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. A-Section, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523006995217009283497845 101985.

38 Finally, there was the negative impact of several closed primaries during the Democratic nominating contest. This category got the least mentions in the party troubles category. As mentioned before, during closed primaries only registered voters can cast their ballot. As

Sanders was an Independent before joining the Democratic Party, many of his supporters were not registered as a Democrat and could, therefore, not vote for Sanders during the primaries.

An article of The Washington Post by David Weigel and John Wagner titled “In New York, the closed primary works against Sanders” stated how independent voters had bolstered Sanders’s successes in states with open primaries, but that the closed primary in New York could mean the end of his campaign.91 The reason why these Independent supporters did not switch to the

Democratic Party was because that many of Sanders’s followers had difficulties with Sanders now being part of the Democratic Party and no longer being an Independent. This led them to not want to be a registered Democrat. Through this, Sanders lost some of his supporters by joining the Democratic Party. The journalists saw these voters as critical for Sanders to win the election. 92

2.4 Policy

The New York Times gave more attention to Sanders’s policies than the other two newspapers.

An article in The New York Times by Michael Lind titled “Trumpism and Clintonism Are the

Future” stated how Sanders’s policies did not fit with the issues that are important today. As chapter 2.1 explained, the minority group is the most important voting bloc for the Democratic

91 David Weigel and John Wagner, “In New York, the Closed Primary Works against Sanders,” The Washington Post, April 18, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. A-Section, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523010980136064303608321 12354. 92 David Weigel, “Sanders Backers Wrestle with the ‘Democrat’ Part,” The Washington Post, May 26, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. A-Section, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523010935622094201970217 69205.

39 Party as winning this group clears the path to the nomination. According to Lind, social and racial issues were most important to this group. Clinton’s campaign focused on these issues, whereas Sanders put the most emphasis on political corruption and inequality of wealth.

Sanders’s policies, thus, did not match with this group of voters.93

The Washington Post put the least emphasis on his policies. In an article titled “Too satisfied to feel the Bern,” Dana Milbank explained why Democrats did not vote on Sanders.

According to Milbank, Democrats were not as unhappy as Sanders needed them to be. During his campaign, Sanders spoke of igniting a political revolution. But, as Milbank stated, the

Democratic voters were not unhappy with the government and his calling of a political revolution did not resonate at all with this groups of Americans. As already shown, Obama remained immensely popular among black Democrats, but, as Milbank stated, Obama remained popular among all Democrats. This made it difficult for Sanders as he had to be critical of

Obama to propagate his own policies and agenda but could not be too critical of Obama since this would cost him votes. This dilemma led Sanders to lose the votes of many Democrats.94

In general, much like Milbank described, the newspapers described a misfit between

Sanders’s policies and the Democratic voters. Clinton’s policies fitted more into the mainstream of what Democrats looked for in a president.

93 Michael Lind, “Trumpism and Clintonism Are the Future,” The New York Times, April 17, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. Sunday Review Desk; SECTSR, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523008078466052508120995 96908. 94 Dana Milbank, “Too Satisfied to Feel the Bern,” The Washington Post, March 2, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. Editorial-Opinion, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523009786686059203899738 38318.

40 2.5 Women and older Democrats

Journalists for the analyzed newspapers predicted that women and older Democrats, together with the minority vote, would be the firewall for the Clinton campaign. This turned out be true as these groups voted convincingly for the former First lady. However, none of the newspapers paid much attention to the importance of the female vote. In an article written on June 9, 2016, for The New York Times by Alexander Burns titled “Primary Takeaways: Clinton Coalition

Never Cracked, and Trump Turns to the Fall,” Burns stated that “(…) Mrs. Clinton's coalition of women, older voters and nonwhites (…): would have to defeat Sanders’s coalition. Later in the same article Burns stated that indeed “Mrs. Clinton's firm base of support repelled Mr.

Sanders repeatedly (…).”95 Even though the women, older Democrats and minority groups were part of the Clinton coalition, the impact of women and older Democrats on the nomination process were named far less than the impact of minority groups. Of interest to note also is that younger and middle-aged women did not vote as much for Clinton as older women did. For older women, one of the reasons they voted for Clinton was because they wanted women to succeed and break the final glass ceiling. Younger and middle-aged women did not feel the urge to vote for Clinton as they had not encountered these barriers.96

The category older Democrats consisted of both men and women. The explanations given in this category do not focus on Clinton being a woman as this was not really a reason for men to vote on Clinton. The reason why this group of voters chose Clinton had to with

95 Alexander Burns, “Primary Takeaways: Clinton Coalition Never Cracked, and Trump Turns to the Fall,” The New York Times, June 9, 2016, The New York Times on the Web edition, sec. Politics; SECT, http://global.factiva.com/redir/default.aspx?P=sa&an=NYTF000020160609ec690006w&cat= a&ep=ASE. 96 Colleen McCain Nelson and Janet Adamy, “Clinton Wins Historic Nomination --- For Some Women, Gender Isn’t Enough,” The Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2016,https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523009940599010911945319 999938.

41 tradition. In a way, Sanders crashed the Democratic Party by becoming a Democrat only to have a bigger chance to win the presidency. This did not sit well with a lot of the traditional

Democrats who were looking for a true and proven Democrat to vote for. Clinton, being part of the Democratic establishment was therefore seen as the true and proven candidate, while the older Democrats viewed Sanders as an intruder in the party.97 All newspapers gave around the same number of mentions of older Democrats as an explanation for Clinton’s success and

Sanders’s struggles

2.6 Fight vs. Trump, a poor campaign strategy and a lack of experience

Making up the back end of the explanations given for Sanders’s loss by the three newspapers are the Vermont senator’s lack of experience, his expected inability to beat Donald Trump in the general election, and his poor campaign strategy and planning. In all three newspapers, these explanations by far received the least mentions. Moreover, The New York Times did not mention

Sanders’s lack of experience, The Washington Post did mention the fight vs. trump and The

Wall Street Journal did not mention Sanders’s poor campaign planning.

On the part of Sanders’s expected inability to beat Donald Trump in the general election, it is a very simple reason why Sanders did not get enough votes: Democrats simply did not believe that Sanders could win a general election. The title of a The New York Times article written by Jason Horowitz is telling for his primary: “Voters Turn to Clinton after Flirting with

Sanders.” Horwitz further explained why Democrats opted for Clinton:

Seeing Donald J. Trump as an existential threat to American values, many

Democrats said in interviews that they were ready to eschew the dreamy Sanders

97 Rucker, Costa, and Wagner, “Doing Great Too Late.”

42 revolution for the heavy artillery of Mrs. Clinton and her battle-tested campaign

machine.98

Because of this, voters would thus have voted for Clinton instead of Sanders.

On the part of Sanders’s campaign planning, the newspapers agreed that Sanders did not manage his campaign correctly, which cost him votes. In a Washington Post article of June

6, 2016, titled “Doing great too late,” the reporters explained how his campaign planning attributed to his loss:

Perhaps the campaign's biggest mistake was not realizing early on that Sanders

could win. That led to a slow start, both in building the infrastructure needed to

run a national campaign and in Sanders's own presence among voters who knew

little about him.99

The New York Times article titled “Early Missteps Seen as a Drag on Sanders Bid” by Patrick

Healy and Yamiche Alcindor of March 2, 2016, reached the same conclusion in that Sanders missed opportunities during his campaign: “But allies and advisers of Mr. Sanders say they missed opportunities to run an aggressive political operation in 2015 that would have presented more of a challenge to Mrs. Clinton.”100

98 Jason Horowitz, “Voters Turn to Clinton after Flirting with Sanders,” The New York Times, March 2, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523010412954026778347467 00424. 99 Rucker, Costa, and Wagner, “Doing Great Too Late.” 100 Patrick Healy and Yamiche Alcindor, “Early Missteps Seen as a Drag on Sanders Bid,” The New York Times, April 4, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523007797193007353260208 480561.

43 Sanders’s lack of experience is the final explanation given by the newspapers. Only The

Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal mention this explanation. Both mentions of the newspapers stated that voters did not vote for Sanders because he did not have the experience

Clinton had. Additionally, a Washington Post article of March 2, 2016, by Paul Schwartzman titled “Trump fends off a strong Rubio; Clinton sails” stated how voters who prefer candidates with experience were key in Clinton’s primary victory in Virginia.101

2.7 So, why did Sanders lose?

In conclusion, it becomes clear that Sanders’s struggles to win the minority vote and the troubles he had with the Democratic Party stand out in the explanations given by the three newspapers.

Other factors such as his policies and campaign strategy are also mentioned but far less than the other two. As stated before, even though the party troubles overall received the most mentions, it was not presented as the factor that played the biggest role in Sanders’s loss. The analyzed media presented his inability to win the coveted minority vote as the most dominant reason for his loss. Seeing that this was a measurable factor, unlike the effect the Democratic

National Convention had on Sanders’s campaign, the influence of the minority vote on the campaign was presented as more influential in Sanders’s loss. Furthermore, the party troubles category most likely received a lot of attention because of the DNC email leak which was spectacular news to cover. In the “horse race” reporting this is the news American media outlets feast on during an election.

All this, however, does not mean that the role the Democratic National Convention played should be ignored. On the contrary, the possible influence of this organization is far reaching. For example, the Democratic Party can determine if a primary is open or closed to

101 Paul Schwartzman, “Trump Fends off a Strong Rubio; Clinton Sails,” The Washington Post, March 2, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. A-Section, https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523010655735003027095813 5354853.

44 non-Democrats.102 As the reporters of the newspapers explained, the closed primaries were a reason for Sanders’s struggles in the race for the nomination. For now, the minority will count as the biggest and most clear explanation for Sanders’s loss in the primaries, at least until the real impact of the Democratic National Convention can be determined.

However, a closer look at the explanations given by the newspapers shows that parts of these explanations are missing. An example of this is the explanation concerning Sanders’s policies and especially how his policies did not match the wants and needs of the traditional

Democratic voting bloc. Chapter three will show what’s missing in this explanation.

102 Scott Detrow, “Making Democrats’ Primaries More Open Could Be Harder Than You Think,” NPR.org, May 21, 2016, accessed March 4, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2016/05/21/478875217/making-democrats-primaries-more-open- could-be-harder-than-you-think.

45 Chapter 3: The invisible invisible primary

Chapter one already stated how the invisible primary has a big influence on the eventual primary and on who eventually wins the nomination. The before mentioned Arthur T. Hadley described the importance of the invisible primary as follows:

The critical battles for the presidency are fought long before the first state

primaries. Far from being decisive politically, the primaries appear more as a

ritual encounter, a symbolic show whose results reinforce a victory already

decided.103

According to Hadley, the winner of the invisible primary will thus be the eventual party nominee. This is where Hadley makes too big a statement as the actual primaries and caucuses do influence the election. Kenny J. Whitby’s more balanced statement best describes the importance of the invisible primary: “(…) winning the invisible primary does give a candidate an advantage but it does not guarantee victory.”104 The conclusion that can, thus, be made is that the invisible primary is indeed of importance in an election. However, nowhere in the media explanations do we find this as a reason for Sanders’s loss.

This chapter will show how important the invisible primary is and why the media should have mentioned it as an explanation for Clinton’s win. It will do this by showing how Clinton reached all her goals during the invisible primary. These goals were to win over the party elites, gather as much money as possible, get as much media attention as possible and to look good as

103 Whitby, “Strategic Decision-Making in Presidential Nominations: When and Why Party Elites Decide to Support a Candidate,” 53. 104 Ibidem, 55.

46 possible in the polls.105 Another part of this pre-primary process, and of special importance in this election cycle, is the development of the Democratic Party. Even though party development is not one of the original four factors Arthur T. Hadley mentioned when describing the invisible primary, it has to be taken into account in this election cycle as it played a crucial role. As chapter two showed, Sanders’s policies not lining up with the wants and needs of the traditional

Democratic voting bloc, most importantly the black Democrats, played an important role in his loss. The analyzed newspapers stated that this was the case because black Democratic voters liked Clinton’s policies better than those of Sanders, that Clinton stood closer to Obama and that blacks had a longstanding affection for the Clinton family. All of these factors were also visible before the actual caucuses and primaries began. Or, in other words, Clinton secured the black vote during the invisible primary.

Missing in the newspapers is an analysis of this party development. Only one article, written by Michael Lind for The New York Times, gives a deeper analysis of the black

Democrats’ affection for Clinton. However, because of the “horse race” reporting style, even this deeper analysis does not go deep enough in explaining this occurrence and, therefore, serves a good example of the effects of “horse race” reporting.

This chapter will consist of four parts. The first part will show how the invisible primary over the years has grown in importance. The second part will focus on endorsements as and will also look at fundraising as both boost one another. The third part will focus on the role of the media during the invisible primary and on poll standings since the media uses these polls in their assessments and the polled public bases its opinions on information from the media. The final part will show exactly why Clinton’s policies played a key role in winning the black vote and how her campaign strategy propelled the former first lady to victory long before the

105 Marty Cohen et al., The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 10.

47 primaries and caucuses began. In turn, this part of chapter three will also show the consequences of “horse race” reporting.

This chapter seeks to give insight into the importance of the invisible primary. It will partly do this by giving an in-depth analysis of why Clinton won the invisible primary. This showing of a deeper context is by no means meant as a critique on media reporting. It is only to show how media reporting differs from in-depth research. Media reporting does not focus on providing all of the context that there is as it does not have to do this. It only seeks to explain why a candidate is leading the horse race. Moreover, newspapers alter their reporting to the reader as the readers of newspapers are not looking for an in-depth review to read every day.

This chapter simply shows the effects of “horse race” reporting; possible explanations for the media not mentioning the role of the invisible primary in their analysis of the 2016 primaries will also be given.

3.1 Headstart vs. Momentum

Before we can get into the role the invisible primary played in the 2016 primary, it must first be shown why the invisible became so important. In general, there are two theories on how to win the primary. The first theory holds that the invisible primary decides who wins the nomination and the second theory emphasizes the importance of momentum, in that momentum created by winning early primaries and caucuses decides the winner of the primaries.106

A key aspect of the momentum theory is media attention. A strong showing in the Iowa and New Hampshire caucuses would give the winner a tremendous amount of media attention which would create enough momentum to propel this candidate to victory.107 Recent scholars have already stated how this theory of momentum does not apply to elections from the 1980s

106 John Aldrich, “The Invisible Primary and Its Effects on Democratic Choice,” PS: Political Science & Politics 42, no. 1 (January 2009): 34. 107 Marty Cohen et al., The Party Decides, 303.

48 onward.108 In chapter one, it was shown that research by Hugh Winebrenner and Dennis J.

Goldford proved that a good showing in Iowa can no longer “make” candidates.

The 2016 primaries also prove the point that momentum alone could not propel Sanders to victory. As chapter 1 showed, his better-than-expected performance in Iowa and his win in

New Hampshire not only gave Sanders more media attention but also more positive media attention. However, this increased positive media attention did not have any effect on the following primaries and caucuses. In fact, Sanders lost all of the next four rounds.109 There was, thus, clearly no evidence of Sanders’s early success creating momentum for his campaign.

The reason why momentum no longer plays the more important role in elections is precisely because the invisible primary has grown increasingly important over the years.

According to research done by John Aldrich, there are two main causes for this. First, the prices of running a campaign have increased dramatically. 110 Prices of running a campaign increased because presidential candidates no longer accepted matching funds. The matching funds system was put in place in for the 1976 presidential nomination and meant that candidates who accepted the matching funds could spend a maximum of 10 million dollars (adjusted to roughly 37 million dollars in 2004 due to inflation) during their primary campaign. In 2000, George Bush was the first winner of the primary who had refused to accept matching funds. In turn, he spent a total of 90 million dollars on his campaign. Al Gore did accept the matching funds and, since this meant he had significantly less money to spend, he was no match for Bush once the primaries got underway. Candidates in the races hereafter did not want to end like Gore and also refused to accept matching funds, John Kerry and Howard Dean being the first to do so in

108 Kenny J. Whitby’s and John Aldrich’s cited works in this thesis are examples of these recent scholars. 109 Andrews, Bennett, and Parlapiano, “2016 Delegate Count and Primary Results.” 110 Aldrich, “The Invisible Primary and Its Effects on Democratic Choice,” 35.

49 2004.111 This means it has been of increasing importance to collect more and more money in the time before the primaries begin, this time is the invisible primary. The second explanation for the rising importance of the invisible primary is the so-called frontloading of primaries and caucuses. Primaries and caucuses are now happening earlier and follow each other faster. As a result, the candidates need more money and they also need this money sooner. This means that

“(…) early campaign building efforts move from valuable to essentially mandatory.”112

3.2 Endorsements: how the 2016 primary stands out

Articles with titles such as “How to win the presidential nomination” or “Who wins the nomination and why” are easy to find, but as it turns out many of these models on why which candidate wins the nomination are no longer accurate. Take Wayne P. Steger’s article titled

“Who Wins Nominations and Why? An Updated Forecast of the Presidential Primary Vote.”

In this article, Steger states how, during Democratic campaigns, party elites are divided and undecided on who to support when the primaries and caucuses begin. Because party elites usually wait until after the New-Hampshire primary with their endorsements, Steger states how

Democratic primaries are thus decided during the real primary season.113 However, Steger also claims that elected party officials who do endorse a candidate before the primaries and caucuses begin do have a positive effect on this candidate’s chances of winning the nomination. This is because, as Steger puts it: “Elite party elected officials thus appear to have a potent effect signaling the partisan electorate as to which candidates should be supported even prior to the caucuses and primaries.”114 Another indicator of the importance of the invisible primary is that

111 Michael J. Malbin, “A Public Funding System in Jeopardy: Lessons from the Presidential Nomination Contest of 2004,” Election Law Journal 5, no. 1 (March 2006): 3. 112 Aldrich, “The Invisible Primary and Its Effects on Democratic Choice,” 35. 113 Wayne P. Steger, “Who Wins Nominations and Why? An Updated Forecast of the Presidential Primary Vote,” Political Research Quarterly 60, no. 1 (March 2007): 98. 114 Steger, “Who Wins Nominations and Why?,” 97.

50 “party insiders use the invisible primary to coordinate behind a preferred candidate and to endow that candidate with the resources and prestige necessary to prevail in the state-by-state contests.”115

In the 2016 primary this was radically different. As a November 10, 2015, CNN article pointed out, by this time already 60% of Democratic senators had endorsed Clinton.116

Moreover, if one looks at the entire run-up to the primary season, it becomes clear how the 2016 primary stands out from all other Democratic primaries. The popular website

FiveTheiryEight.com, named after the number of electors in the United States Electoral

College, focusses on analyzing elections. During the 2016 invisible primary, it kept track of endorsements made by U.S. representatives, senators and governors to all the candidates. The way this was done was by giving points to the candidates for each endorsement they received.

An endorsement from a governor was worth ten points, a senator’s endorsement five points and one point for the endorsement of a U.S. representative. The distribution of points is based on the fact that there are about five times as many representatives as there are senators and roughly

10 times as many U.S. representatives as there are governors. This leads Clinton, at the end of the primaries, to having a total of 523 points to Sanders’s 13. The truly interesting point is that

Clinton had already amassed 458 points two days before the Iowa Caucuses. 117 This is a clear example of how endorsements did in fact occur during the invisible primary.

To prove that the 2016 invisible primary stands out can be shown by comparing it to other invisible primaries. Al Gore’s presidential campaign of 2000 comes closest to that of

Clinton. Gore would score a total of 448 points, of which 371 came before the Iowa caucuses.

115 Whitby, Strategic Decision-Making in Presidential Nominations: When and Why Party Elites Decide to Support a Candidate, 54. 116 Dan Merica, “Here Are the Senators Who Have Already Endorsed Clinton,” CNN, November 10, 2015, accessed February 26, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2015/02/02/politics/hillary-clinton-2016-endorsements/index.html. 117 Aaron Bycoffe, “The 2016 Endorsement Primary,” FiveThirtyEight, June 7, 2016, accessed February 26, 2018, http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-endorsement-primary/.

51 The big difference here being that Clinton had already scored 179 points almost a year before the Iowa caucuses compared to Gore’s 50.118 However, there really is no other Democratic invisible primary campaign that can compare to that of Clinton when it comes to endorsements.

Now that it is clear how Clinton had a great deal of endorsements from party elites within the

Democratic Party, the question remains how big of an effect this had on the eventual primaries, since the votes of superdelegates alone do not win a presidential primary.

The short answer to this question is that early endorsements have a great deal of effect on how the primaries and caucuses are decided. Or, as political scientists Marty Cohen, David

Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller state in their 2008 book The Party Decides: Presidential

Nominations Before and After Reform, “The conclusion from the statistical analysis is, as we have seen, that early endorsements in the invisible primary are the most important cause of candidate success in the state primaries and caucuses.”119 There are several reasons as for why this is the case. First, endorsements have an effect on voters. Endorsements serve as suggestions to voters who to pick. As Cohen and his colleagues pointed out, this has a genuine effect on voter behavior as voters are usually not very interested, not very informed and easily attracted to a candidate simply because he or she is doing well, they will likely follow the advice on who to vote on.120 Kenny J. Whitby adds to this by stating that “Endorsements can serve as a signal or heuristic for voters in those settings [settings where there is not a lot of information on the candidates’ policies] and possibly allow them to make informed decisions about candidates and issues.”121

However, a critical side note must be made here. An endorsement is unlikely to change the mind of somebody who has already decided to vote for a particular candidate. Endorsements

118 Ibidem. 119 Cohen et al., The Party Decides, 305. 120 Ibidem, 297. 121 Whitby, Strategic Decision-Making in Presidential Nominations: When and Why Party Elites Decide to Support a Candidate, 64.

52 will, therefore, only confirm somebody’s thought towards a candidate and an endorsement can only persuade those voters who have not yet made their minds up. But seeing that most voters are not headstrong on who to vote for, the endorsements can convince many of these voters.

Another reason as for why endorsements are so important is that they generate a lot of resources. The most important resource for the candidates is money. And as former Republican

Senator Mark Hanna put it: “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can't remember the second.”122 A quick look at the fundraising total of both candidates shows that Clinton gathered much more money than Sanders did. As of October 16,

2015, Clinton had raised 786 million dollars, compared to Sanders’s 237 million dollars.123 A clear victory for Clinton.

But aside from money, endorsements also give candidates other valuable resources such as volunteers, and as individuals such as senators or governors may possess some personal organization that can help the candidate on the campaign trail their endorsements can also be helpful in other ways than donations alone. Among organizations, unions are especially helpful to candidates. As Cohen and his colleagues point out, unions mobilize others in their communities to vote for the candidate they endorsed, and this helps spread the message.124 A

1984 study by Ronald B. Rappaport, Walter J. Stone and Alan I. Abramowitz titled “Do

Endorsements Matter? Group Influences in the 1984 Democratic Caucuses” researched the effect of endorsements by unions. The study shows that because Democratic candidate Walter

Mondale had the support of teachers’ groups, labor unions and women groups, he received a

122 Bruce Bartlett, “Money And Politics,” Forbes, June 12, 2009, accessed February 26, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/2009/06/11/terry-mcauliffe-virginia-primaries-opinions- columnists-fundraising. 123 Chris Zubak-Skees, “See How Much the 2016 Presidential Candidates Have Raised so Far,” Center for Public Integrity, October 16, 2015, https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/10/16/18631/see-how-much-2016-presidential- candidates-have-raised-so-far. 124 Cohen et al., The Party Decides, 293.

53 6% advantage at the caucuses.125 Cohen and his colleagues add to this by stating how this 6%, even though it does not look like much, put Mondale over the top in, for example, the Virginia caucuses.126

To conclude, it can be stated that Clinton won both the endorsement and money race during the invisible primary. Especially since she managed to win endorsements from party elites in such a convincing manner. This gave voters an indication of who to vote for and it gave her money as well as other valuable assets. The next part of this chapter will analyze the other critical part of the invisible primary: the media attention. Very much like in this part of the analysis, there was a clear winner in the fight for media attention.

3.3 The media in control of the invisible primary

The media has great influence on the campaign as they have a big say in how each candidate is viewed by the public. This is simply because mainstream media are usually the only source of information for voters this early in the invisible primary. The media’s main task is to inform the public of which candidate is endorsed by who, which candidate is in the lead of the money race and who leads what poll. Or, in other words, inform the public who is in the lead. Media outlets evaluate the prospects of all the candidates based on a set of factors. These factors can include a candidate’s political experience, fundraising successes, polling results and so on.127

But what the media does next is far more important: media outlets start narrowing the field of contestants. This is necessary for the media to do this as they usually do not have the resources

125 Ronald B. Rapoport, Walter J. Stone, and Alan I. Abramowitz, “Do Endorsements Matter? Group Influence in the 1984 Democratic Caucuses,” The American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (March 1991): 201. 126 Cohen et al., The Party Decides, 293. 127 Todd L. Belt, Marion R. Just, and Ann N. Crigler, “The 2008 Media Primary: Handicapping the Candidates in Newspapers, on TV, Cable and the Internet,” The International Journal of Press/Politics 17, no. 3 (April 2012): 342.

54 or the space to report on all the campaigns.128 Researchers Michael J. Robinson and Margaret

A. Sheehan called this narrowing of the field of contestants “journalistic triage” where candidates are put in one of three categories “the hopeless,” “the plausible,” and “the likely.”129

This narrowing of the field has great consequences for the candidates. The main reason for this is that everything from fundraising to poll results is interconnected with the media. For example, if a candidate raises a lot of money, this will get him or her a lot of media attention which in turn will lead to more donations. As the candidates who perform best in, for example, poll ratings and fundraising get the most attention, the media pays little attention to the candidates that leg behind in fundraising or poll results. The interaction here is that the candidates who did receive media attention will likely perform better in the next polls because the public knows that they are doing well. Belt and his colleagues characterize the interaction between money and media attention: “Candidates who are ignored by the press cannot raise money, and candidates who do not raise money are ignored by the press.”130 Raised money can be used to buy ads which will increase a candidate’s name recognition as it will give him more attention. The public often forget candidates that do not get enough media attention, and forgotten candidates stand no chance of winning the nomination. In short, everything is interconnected with the media.

Another important consequence of the media is that the amount of attention the media gives to a candidate has an effect on voters. The amount of attention and the nature of attention

(positive or negative) given to a candidate have the power to push voters to a certain candidate.

After all, as professor Miloš Gregor states when commenting on the media reporting in the 2016 election: “How the media represent each of the candidates has the ability to affect people’s

128 Belt, Just, and Crigler, “The 2008 Media Primary,” 343. 129 Michael J. Robinson and Margaret A. Sheehan, Over the Wire and on TV: CBS and UPI in Campaign ’80s (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1983): 76. 130 Belt, Just, and Crigler, “The 2008 Media Primary,” 345.

55 voting decisions and thus the election results.”131 In sum, a good performance with regards to the media in the invisible primary is of the highest importance.

Chapter one already showed that Clinton received a lot more media attention than

Sanders did. However, it also became clear that the former first lady received drastically more negative media reporting than Sanders did. This begs the question who actually won this part of the invisible primary. Was it Clinton because she got more attention even though most of it was negative, or was it Sanders because the reporting on him was a lot more positive even though he did not receive nearly as much coverage as Clinton? Or, put differently, is the amount of coverage in this part of the invisible primary or is the tone of the coverage the key to success?

As stated before, the main priority of the candidates during the invisible primary is to increase their name recognition. Especially during this part of the campaign, the amount of media attention trumps everything else. As Thomas E. Patterson states, “Less coverage of the

Democratic side worked against Bernie Sanders’s efforts to make inroads on Clinton’s support.”132 The Vermont Senator’s struggles in the early part of the invisible primary to receive media attention coupled with this poor poll standings, as opposed to Clinton’s good poll standings, made it impossible for Sanders to get the attention he so badly needed. One of the areas where this hurt him most was with the minorities. As was made painfully clear in chapter two, Sanders dramatically lost the minority vote to Clinton. As a March 4, 2016, article written by Trymaine Lee of MSBC stated, “Yet, Clinton has dominated the black vote while Sanders has netted a huge segment of white and young primary voters. What’s behind the deep divide?

131 Miloš Gregor, “Rise of Donald Trump: media as a voter-Decision accelerator,” in US Election Analysis 2016: Media, Voters and the Campaign, ed. Darren Lilleker, Daniel Jackson, Einar Thorsen and Anastasia Veneti (Poole: The Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture and Community Bournemouth University, 2016), 18. 132 Patterson, “Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race,” 11.

56 Name recognition certainly tops the list.”133 Lee continued by stating that Sanders was a relative unknown within the black community when he announced his candidacy.134 Patterson’s comments on Sanders receiving less attention explain why he could never recover from this.

Now, what remains is to explain why Clinton’s predominantly negative media attention did not hurt her as much. Research by Loes Aaldering showed that the effect of negative media attention is not as big as the effect of positive media attention: “The negative effect of negative images in the media is smaller than the positive effect of positive images. Thus, positive descriptions of party leaders in terms of their leadership qualities are more in influential than negative descriptions.”135 Another possible explanation is that, even though the reporting on

Clinton was more negative than positive, she was still overwhelmingly described as the leading candidate in the race, or as the “likely” candidate according to Robinson and Sheehan. This, combined with Sanders receiving vastly less media attention, means that the positive coverage of Sanders did not reach as many people as the Vermont senator needed. After all, it is a good thing to receive positive news coverage, but if it reaches relatively few people it’s not going to have a big effect.

This is not to say that the overwhelmingly negative media attention Clinton received did not hurt her. Patterson gave the clearest summary of the effects of the media on Clinton during the invisible primary: “Clinton entered 2015 as the presumptive Democratic nominee.

She was still the presumptive nominee at the end of 2015, though a weakened one as she headed

133 Trymaine Lee, “Sanders’ Radical Message Missing Moderate Blacks,” MSNBC, March 4, 2016, accessed March 4, 2018, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/sanders-radical-message- missing-moderate-blacks. 134 Lee, “Sanders’ Radical Message Missing Moderate Blacks,” http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/sanders-radical-message-missing-moderate-blacks. 135 Loes Aaldering, “Images with Impact The Electoral Consequences of Party Leader Portrayal in the Media” (Master’s thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2018), 84, http://dare.uva.nl/search?identifier=f60d7295-cbb8-4a34-b1de-bc1dfdf2583c.

57 into the Iowa caucuses.”136 But since name recognition is the most important aspect of the media during this part of the nomination race, despite being thrashed by the media Clinton was still the presumptive nominee; as a result, it can be stated that she won this part of the invisible primary as well.

3.4 The black vote already decided

As shown in chapter 2, black democrats are the most coveted group of Democratic voters.

Sanders not winning over this group was one of the explanations the media gave for his loss.

Reasons the media gave for Sanders losing the black vote were that Sanders remained an unknown figure within the black community (see chapter 3.3), and that his policies did not line up with those of the black Democrats. Yet, the analyzed articles did not fully explain where these differences in policy preferences come from. An article of New York Times reporter

Michael Lind gives a good example of the limited context the three newspapers gave in their reporting on the primaries. In his article titled “Trumpism and Clintonism Are the Future,” he explains why Hillary Clinton’s policies are a better fit with black Democrats than Bernie

Sanders’s policies. Apart from being one of the only articles, during the primaries, that offered some form of context for Sanders’s struggles to fit in with the party, it leaves the reader with some questions.

In his article, Lind explains how the voting bloc of the Democratic Party has changed since her husband, Bill Clinton, won the presidency in the 90s. This coalition of Democratic voters consists of “(…) an alliance of Northern, Midwestern and West Coast whites from the old Rockefeller Republican tradition with blacks and Latinos."137 Lind continues by stating that voting blocs of both the Democratic and Republican parties were broken up around the 1970s.

136 Patterson, “Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race,” 16-17. 137 Lind, “Trumpism and Clintonism Are the Future.”

58 Lind also makes the rightful comment that Clinton adjusted her policies to the party’s existing base. However, Lind does not mention that the Democratic Party had been the party of the minorities since the 1950s and 1960s or under what circumstances the voting blocs were broken up.138 This chapter will answer these questions.

The Democratic Party became the party of minorities amid a push for equality with the

Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. All of these events had their impacts on the

Democratic Party itself and would eventually make it the party that sought-after equality and economic justice. During the 1950s and 1960s the Democratic Party became the “Party of the

People.” The fight for civil rights had its origin in the 1940s and in these and the following years the Civil Rights Movement would make a name for itself. The Democratic Party would become the main supporter of civil rights. As a result of the Civil Rights Movement, under the political leadership of President John F. Kennedy and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson, the

Democratic Party shed its Southern segregationist and discriminatory past as it became the defender of racial justice.139

However, at the end of Kennedy’s presidency, discrimination and segregation were still major problems in U.S. society. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, would continue on the road paved by his predecessor.140 During this period, the Democratic Party would also become the party for all minorities and women, but especially that of African-Americans, something that is still the case today. As David Leege states, during this time “Blacks became and remained Democrats.”141

138 Witcover, Party of the People, 731. 139 Ibidem, 508-511. 140 Ibidem, 518. 141 David C. Leege, The Politics of Cultural Differences Social Change and Voter Mobilization Strategies in the Post-New Deal Period (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 187.

59 This brings us to the 1970s as Michael Lind’s article shows how the change of the

Democratic voting blocs now picks ups again. Lind explains how, during this time, the

Republicans started leaning on business and a limited-government perspective while the

Democrats fought for social equality.142 But Lind does not explain where these changes came from. According to Thomas Borstelmann, these changes came in a U.S. society that followed two currents. The first current was the push for a free market and the second current was a growing social equality.143 It may seem odd to have growing economic inequality and rising social equality but, as Borstelmann explained, it is actually quite logical. The link between the free-market ideal and the social inclusion was that free markets provided benefits for both buyers and sellers. As Borstelmann states, “The green of currency was the only color that mattered.”144

These social and economic changes also had their impact on both parties’ voting blocs.

The Democratic Party’s focus on broad inclusiveness, gay rights, women’s equality, civil rights, and environmentalism meant that voters who thought equality was most important (minority voters ranking high in this category) chose the Democratic Party.145 The Republican Party followed the current of the free market and voters who favored this and cared less about equality would turn to the Republican Party. 146

In the 1990s, the Democratic Party once again strengthened its ties with the black community through the presidency of Bill Clinton. American novelist and Nobel Prize winner

Toni Morrison, in 1998, even stated that Bill Clinton was the first black president: “(…) white

142 Lind, “Trumpism and Clintonism Are the Future.” 143 Borstelmann, The 1970s a New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality, 26-27. 144 Ibidem, 206. 145 Ibidem, 206. 146 Leege, The Politics of Cultural Differences Social Change and Voter Mobilization Strategies in the Post-New Deal Period, 38.

60 skin notwithstanding, this [Bill Clinton] is our first black President.”147 Morrison came to this conclusion because, according to her, Clinton’s life resembled the life of black Americans at that time: “After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from

Arkansas.”148 What Morrison meant by this was that Clinton, like many blacks, started life from a disadvantaged position working against him. This was further made clear during the Monica

Lewinsky scandal where Morrison stated that Clinton was being treated as a black America on the street: “The always and already guilty ‘perp’ (…).”149 Aside from Clinton’s life resembling that of black Americans, the 42nd president reached out to black Americans throughout his presidency. What also helped his popularity was that Clinton’s presidency was a time during which the median income in black American households grew 25% and black unemployment plummeted.150 This led many black Americans to identify with President Clinton and, as research by Alan I. Abramowitz and Kyle L. Saunders shows, more black Americans identified with the party in the 1990s than in the 1980s, a time when the Democratic Party was trying to reinvent itself.151

The election of Democrat Barack Obama as president in 2008 meant that black

Americans still remained loyal to the Democratic Party. President Obama’s role explains why black Americans remained loyal to the Democratic Party but there is also another explanation for this. Theodore R. Johnson of The Washington Post researched where this loyalty comes

147 Toni Morrison, “On the First Black President,” The New Yorker, September 28, 1998, accessed April 2, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/10/05/comment-6543. 148 Morrison, “On the First Black President.” 149 Ibidem. 150 Danielle Kurtzleben, “Understanding The Clintons’ Popularity With Black Voters,” NPR.org, March 1, 2016, accessed April 2, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2016/03/01/468185698/understanding-the-clintons-popularity-with- black-voters. 151 Alan I. Abramowitz and Kyle L. Saunders, “Ideological Realignment in the U.S. Electorate,” The Journal of Politics 60, no. 3 (1998): 641.

61 from. As Johnson states, in 2012, 45% percent of African-Americans identified as liberal and

47% identified as conservative, while 93% of African-Americans voted for Obama, who ran for the more liberal Democratic Party.152 Johnson has two explanations for this trend. First,

Johnson states that “(…) Black voters use the group’s well-being as a proxy for their own interests; the ‘black utility heuristic’.”153 Second, Johnson states that black voters prioritize civil rights issues over anything else. According to Johnson, most black voters see a Democratic vote as the same as supporting civil rights and a Republican vote as a vote against their group’s well- being. Even though the respondents did not say themselves that party affiliation was the most important part of their choice on who to vote, the data shows that this is the case.154

Now, as has been shown, the Democratic Party was the choice for black Americans from the 1950s on and remained so. As Lind and this in-depth analysis point out, the black community in America puts more emphasis on social and racial issues. Sanders’s campaign did not focus on these aspects as his most prominent messages dealt with the economy and political corruption. Clinton, however, perfectly put into place a campaign strategy that lined up with the history of the Democratic Party and the wants and needs of the black Democrats. This is precisely why Sanders did not win the black vote. Hillary Clinton altered her strategy to the way the Democratic Party and its voting blocs developed over the years. Clinton, thus, used the invisible primary to develop a strategy that would win over black voters, whereas Sanders did not.

The key difference between Lind’s analysis and this one is that the two key questions that remained after analyzing Lind’s article, how the Democratic voting blocs changed and why

152 Theodore R. Johnson, “Why Are African-Americans Such Loyal Democrats When They Are so Ideologically Diverse?,” Washington Post.Com, September 28, 2016, sec. monkey-cage, http://global.factiva.com/redir/default.aspx?P=sa&an=WPCOM00020160928ec9s0025u&cat =a&ep=ASE. 153 Johnson, “Why Are African-Americans Such Loyal Democrats When They Are so Ideologically Diverse?” 154 Ibidem.

62 the minority group puts so much emphasis on social and racial issues, has now been answered.

The effects of “horse race” reporting are hereby shown.

3.5 Why the invisible primary remained invisible

Two things have become clear in the analysis of chapter four: first, the invisible primary is a highly important factor in winning the nomination and second, Clinton won every single facet of the invisible primary. The fact that the invisible primary plays such a big role makes it strange that none of the analyzed newspapers mentioned this as an explanation for Sanders’s loss.

The closest the newspapers did come to explaining the impact of the invisible primary was writing about how endorsements could have an impact on the race and how Clinton gathered a lot more money than Sanders. A February 1st, 2016, article titled “Sanders vs. The

Machine” written by the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal is an example of this. In this article, the authors wrote how Clinton had the backing of the Democratic Party’s establishment consisting of lobbies and unions. However, this article is nothing more than an early prediction as the authors stated that “This machine is all coming together in Iowa to knock Mr. Sanders out in the first round.”155 Nowhere in the articles commenting on the 2016 primaries and caucuses is there a mention of the impact of this on the results of the caucuses and primaries.

Why is this?

A possible explanation for this is that, because the media is solely focused on the “horse race” during the primaries and caucuses, it only looks at and has time for the present and not the past. Since actual votes can now be counted and the public is more interested in the race,

155 “Sanders vs. the Machine,” The Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2016, https://global- factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=1523010506365083557518608 95752.

63 the media is much more concerned about what candidates are doing at this that time to win votes. Additionally, since most of the articles analyze a certain primary, the specific reasons for

Sanders’ loss, such as his inability to win the minority vote, received a lot more attention as the effects of this are measurable and more clearly visible. This also partly explains why Michael

Lind’s article did not have the depth it needed to explain why Clinton won the black vote before the race began as this did not fit into the “horse race” framework.

Nevertheless, it remains noticeable how none of the articles on Sanders’s campaign mentioned the impact of the invisible primary. Some articles do mention Clinton’s broad support among the party elites but frame it in such a way that it looks as though she received this support only during the actual race and not beforehand. The conclusion that can be drawn is that, before the primaries and caucuses began, it was already decided who would win. It was as though Seabiscuit got a ten-second head start on the rest of the field and, in that case, nobody can catch up.

64 Chapter 4: Conclusion

This thesis sought to research how different American newspapers explained Bernie Sanders’s loss during the 2016 presidential primaries. The statement this thesis defended was that conservative and liberal media focus on different explanations for Sanders’s loss and that through the style of media reporting several important factors in Sanders’s primary defeat, such as the invisible primary, were not sufficiently explained.

Chapter one gave an overview of media reporting during the primaries and showed how the media used the framework of the “horse race” when reporting on the primaries and caucuses.

This framework presents the campaign as a race where descriptions of candidates were based on their position in the race and the contestants were constantly compared to each other. The consequence of this was that the attention shifted away from in-depth discussions on political issues and the candidates themselves became the focus of the stories. Additionally, chapter one also showed how Sanders received drastically less media attention during both the invisible and the real primary in 2016. Sanders did, however, receive the most positive media coverage of all the candidates, both Democratic and Republican. Unfortunately for Sanders, the positive media attention he did get did not focus on his issues or policies. No candidate received less coverage on their policies and issues than Sanders.

In chapter two, the focus shifted to the real analysis of the three U.S. newspapers: The

New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. The papers were analyzed from the February 1, 2016, through the August 1, 2016. The analysis showed that there were eight explanations given by the newspapers for Sanders’s loss: Sanders’s inability to win the minority vote, Sanders’s policies, Sanders’s poor campaign planning, Sanders’s troubles within the party, Sanders not being able to defeat Trump in the final election, Sanders’s inability to win over women, Sanders’s lack of experience, and finally the older Democrats voting overwhelmingly for Clinton. The media often mentioned Clinton’s firewall of minority voters,

65 older democrats and women as the main reason for her victory of Sanders. However, the newspapers presented the minority vote as the most import factor in Clinton’s victory.

Conversely, the category of party troubles received the most mentions. This category consisted of the role the Democratic National Convention played, the influence of closed primaries and the influence of superdelegates. These three factors were placed in one category as they all had to do with the party working against Sanders’s bid for the presidency. The role of the Democratic National Convention stands out as this received the most mentions from the newspapers and because it was a highly controversial topic since this institution clearly favored

Clinton and actively worked against the Sanders campaign. However, the role of the

Democratic National Convention has less merit as an explanation for Sanders’s loss since it remains speculative how much impact this had on the Sanders campaign. The newspapers also presented it as having less of an impact on the race for the nomination. More research should be done to discover just how much of an impact the Democratic National Convention had on the Sanders campaign.

The remaining explanations for Sanders’s loss received significantly less mentions by the newspapers. All newspapers showed the same general trend in explaining his loss. The only noticeable difference is to be found in the policy explanation. The New York Times gave twice as many mentions of this as the other newspapers did and The Wall Street Journal made more mentions of the impact of superdelegates. Additionally, The Wall Street Journal gave more attention to the role superdelegates played. However, all three newspapers showed the same general trend in explaining the loss of Bernie Sanders.

The conclusion of the first part of the proposed thesis statement can, thus, be answered by stating that there we no real significant different in the way the more conservative Wall

Street Journal, the middle-of-the-road Washington Post and the more liberal New York Times explained Bernie Sanders’s loss in the 2016 presidential primary.

66 In chapter three, the importance of the invisible primary was shown. First, it was shown that the invisible primary, over the years, had grown more important than the theory of creating momentum. The momentum theory stated that, momentum created by good showings in the

Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary would propel candidates towards the nomination because a good early showing would give a boost in positive media, general media attention and money. However, during the 2000s this changed. This was because campaigns had increased dramatically in costs, and primaries and caucuses were held earlier and closer together which meant that candidates had to have more money sooner.

Having proven that the invisible primary is an important aspect of the campaign, my analysis showed that Clinton won all facets of this part of the campaign. She beat Sanders in endorsements, fundraising, media attention, poll standings and managed to use the development of the Democratic Party as a way to win the coveted black vote. The chapter also showed that, because Clinton won this important part of the campaign so overwhelmingly, it must have impacted the campaign. This makes it strange that the analyzed media outlets did not present this as an explanation for Sanders’s loss. A possible explanation for this is that the media is fixated on the framework of the “horse race” and that it only focuses on what candidates are doing during the actual caucuses and primaries to win votes. Additionally, the focus was on factors such as poll standings as this was a measurable factor whereas the impact of the invisible primary was not.

This thesis has shown how The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall

Street Journal explained the loss of Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential primaries.

There were no real differences in the explanations given by the three different newspapers. In addition, it was shown that, because of the media’s fixation on the candidates in the “horse race” framework, the media did not mention important parts of explanations and the importance of the invisible primary. In the future, more research has to be done to find why the media did

67 not involve the invisible primary in their explanations of Sanders’s loss and what the consequences of “horse race” reporting are for the public. Some studies on this have already been done, but what is still missing in these studies is whether the role of the invisible primary has been marginalized in the reporting of other elections because it does not fit within the “horse race” framework.

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Ross, Janell. “What Bernie Sanders Still Doesn’t Get about Arguing with Hillary Clinton.” Washington Post, March 7, 2016. Accessed January 26, 2018. sec. The Fix. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/07/what-bernie-sanders-still- doesnt-get-about-interrupting-hillary-clinton/.

“Sanders Gaining Ground on Clinton, in Echoes of 2008.” Fox News, January 15, 2016. Accessed April 20, 2017. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01/15/sanders-gaining-ground-on- clinton-in-echoes-2008.html.

Snell, Kelsey. “Sanders Tax Plan Would Raise $15.3 Trillion to Fund New Spending.” Washington Post, March 4, 2016. Accessed May 25, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/03/04/sanders-tax-plan-would- raise-15-3-trillion-to-fund-new-spending/.

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Wolfgang, Ben. “Bernie Sanders Gaining Crucial Ground over Clinton in South Carolina.” Washington Times, January 14, 2016. Accessed April 22, 2017. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jan/14/bernie-sanders-gaining-crucial-ground- over-clinton/.

Zubak-Skees, Chris. “See How Much the 2016 Presidential Candidates Have Raised so Far.” Center for Public Integrity, October 16, 2015. https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/10/16/18631/see-how-much-2016-presidential- candidates-have-raised-so-far.

Analyzed newspaper articles:

Alcindor, Yamiche. “In a Black Church in South Carolina, Sanders Struggles to Get an ‘Amen.’” The New York Times, February 22, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230068902260647020328261 2167.

Alpert, Lukas I., and Byron Tau. “Election 2016: Early Clinton Call Was a Surprise.” The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230069564180380770329759 23397.

73 Balz, Dan. “First Lady Helps Put Gathering Back on Script.” The Washington Post, July 26, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. A-Section. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230069745640977053224034 7366.

———. “Leaked Emails aside, the DNC Has Been a Long-Standing Problem.” The Washington Post, July 25, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. A-Section. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230069952170092834978451 01985.

Bauerlein, Valerie. “Election 2016: Clinton Eyes Win In North Carolina.” The Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230070314960062399546891 69891.

Blow, Charles M. “More Damned Emails.” The New York Times, July 25, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. Editorial Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230070477310305340988183 9009.

Board, Editorial. “Russia’s Motives for Meddling.” The Washington Post, July 26, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. Editorial-Opinion. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230070883340069166160898 15353.

Board, The Editorial. “It Was Better to Bern Out.” The New York Times, June 11, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. Editorial Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230071221210444488229353 74055.

———. “What Was Mr. Trump Thinking?” The New York Times, July 28, 2016, Late Edition- Final edition, sec. Editorial Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230071379430042135566543 39523.

Burns, Alexander. “Clinton and Trump Roll On, at Different Speeds.” The New York Times, March 17, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230071726300247333895432 37538.

———. “Primary Night Takeaways: Hillary Clinton Is Shaken and Donald Trump Roars Back.” The New York Times, March 10, 2016, The New York Times on the Web edition, sec. Politics; SECT. http://global.factiva.com/redir/default.aspx?P=sa&an=NYTF000020160310ec3a0007r&cat=a &ep=ASE.

———. “Primary Takeaways: Clinton Coalition Never Cracked, and Trump Turns to the Fall.” The New York Times, June 9, 2016, The New York Times on the Web edition, sec. Politics; SECT.

74 http://global.factiva.com/redir/default.aspx?P=sa&an=NYTF000020160609ec690006w&cat= a&ep=ASE.

Calvert, Scott. “Election 2016: Senate Primary Reveals Racial Gap.” The Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230072648600464583840558 6551.

Capehart, Jonathan. “Don’t Blame Wasserman Schultz for Sanders’s Political Failures.” The Washington Post, July 26, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. Editorial-Opinion. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230072952450172815809696 04116.

Chozick, Amy. “Clinton Reaches Historic Mark, A.P. Says.” The New York Times, June 7, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230073168820796335623779 8035.

———. “Democrats Allege D.N.C. Hack Is Part of Russian Effort to Elect Donald Trump.” The New York Times, July 26, 2016, The New York Times on the Web edition, sec. Politics; SECT. http://global.factiva.com/redir/default.aspx?P=sa&an=NYTF000020160726ec7q0007b&cat=a &ep=ASE.

———. “Older Voters Help to Give Clinton Wins.” The New York Times, March 21, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230073568750706821101865 1362.

Chozick, Amy, Patrick Healy; Amy Chozick reported from Columbia, S.C, Patrick Healy from New York Yamiche Alcindor contributed reporting from Columbia, S.C, and Megan Thee- Brenan from New York. “South Carolina Powers Clinton to Huge Victory.” The New York Times, February 28, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA.

Chozick, Amy, Patrick Healy, Amy Chozick, and Patrick Healy. “Trump and Clinton Are Victorious; Bush Drops Out as Field Narrows.” The New York Times, February 21, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230073898850559265058642 0068.

Cohn, Nate. “Polling Doesn’t Prove Sanders Won Hispanic Vote in Nevada.” The New York Times, February 23, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230074071970949947871005 2341.

Confessore, Nicholas. “Hacked Emails Reveal How the Party Favors Flow to Wealthy Donors.” The New York Times, July 26, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva-

75 com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230074257930628547743236 108.

Dawsey, Josh, and Erica Orden. “City News: New Yorkers Cast Their Votes With Mixed Feelings.” The Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230074501520925674600757 144.

DelReal, Jose A., Jenna Johnson, and John Wagner. “Trump: Clinton Threw DNC Chairwoman ‘under a Bus.’” The Washington Post, July 26, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. A-Section. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230074756020826482284092 6178.

“Don’t Discount the Success of the Sanders ‘Revolution.’” The Washington Post, July 20, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. Editorial-Opinion. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230075017670344067306947 31413.

Eilperin, Juliet. “Behind Clinton, a Marriage of Two Political Machines.” The Washington Post, July 27, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. A-Section. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230075255370765454257743 3685.

“Election 2016: Eastern States Are Set to Get Rare Turn in Primary Spotlight.” The Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230075604160674775565355 3178.

Epstein, Reid J., and Damian Paletta. “Election 2016: Trump Says Russia Remarks ‘Sarcastic.’” The Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230075864250066592611713 73776.

Finley, Allysia. “The Democrats’ Second Email Problem.” The Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230076032510476704563087 20677.

Galston, William A. “Politics & Ideas: The Endangered Democratic Moderate.” The Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230076399310202907201256 01103.

Gearan, Anne. “In Virginia, Clinton Pursues Votes of Suburban Women.” The Washington Post, May 9, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. A-Section. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230077178910799887749323 3447.

76 Grynbaum, Michael M. “Ego Clashes Exposed in Democratic National Committee Emails.” The New York Times, July 25, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230077560800144583863546 28405.

Haberman, Maggie. “Super Tuesday Takeaways: Trump and Clinton Sprint, While Others Stumble.” The New York Times, March 3, 2016, The New York Times on the Web edition, sec. Politics; SECT. http://global.factiva.com/redir/default.aspx?P=sa&an=NYTF000020160303ec330007e&cat=a &ep=ASE.

Healy, Patrick. “Democrats Fight to Pull Together on an Unruly Day.” The New York Times, July 26, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230077768340616414424760 7669.

Healy, Patrick, and Yamiche Alcindor. “Early Missteps Seen as a Drag on Sanders Bid.” The New York Times, April 4, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230077971930073532602084 80561.

Healy, Patrick, and Amy Chozick. “Minority Voters Help Push Clinton to Triumphs in Democratic Race.” The New York Times, March 2, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230078133690060892713080 10702.

———. “Voters Reject Sanders in Ohio as Clinton Rebounds From Michigan.” The New York Times, March 16, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230078296120850945795419 5119.

Healy, Patrick, and Jonathan Martin. “SANDERS IS VICTOR IN MICHIGAN UPSET; TRUMP TAKES TWO.” The New York Times, March 9, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230078651920176785155180 58913.

Henninger, Dan. “The Economy Trumps Everything.” The Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2016.

Hohmann, James. “DNC Chair’s Primary Fight Echoes Rift within Party.” The Washington Post, May 30, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. A-Section. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230078887410403501825303 85936.

Hook, Janet. “Election 2016: Sanders Slices Into Clinton’s Lead.” The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2016. https://global-factiva-

77 com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230079078770278959203402 8565.

Horowitz, Jason. “Debbie Wasserman Schultz Is Met With Jeers at Pre-Convention Breakfast.” The New York Times, July 26, 2016, The New York Times on the Web edition, sec. Politics; SECT. http://global.factiva.com/redir/default.aspx?P=sa&an=NYTF000020160726ec7q0007c&cat=a &ep=ASE.

“How the Candidates Fared in Georgia, Massachusetts, Texas and Virginia.” The New York Times, March 2, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230079542750628078184619 7231.

Hughes, Siobhan, and Byron Tau. “For Sanders Army, Fight Isn’t Over.” The Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230079706210302962896375 7566.

Hulse, Carl. “For a Party Chairwoman, Loyalty (to Clinton) Was Seen as a Fault.” The New York Times, July 26, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global- factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230079909630181709957290 65054.

Kristof, Nicholas. “Putin, Trump and Our Election.” The New York Times, July 28, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. Editorial Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230080264430384248837806 2813.

Krugman, Paul. “Feel the Math.” The New York Times, May 30, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. Editorial Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230080397730072190709192 29453.

Lane, Charles. “In Praise of Superdelegates.” The Washington Post, June 9, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. Editorial-Opinion. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230080560030498982176671 65023.

Lind, Michael. “Trumpism and Clintonism Are the Future.” The New York Times, April 17, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. Sunday Review Desk; SECTSR. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230080784660525081209959 6908.

Martin, Jonathan. “Leaks Bring Down a Democratic Leader.” The New York Times, July 25, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230090956420199477485252 43625.

78 Martin, Jonathan, and Nate Cohn. “What We’re Watching in Florida, Ohio and Other Primaries.” The New York Times, March 16, 2016, The New York Times on the Web edition, sec. Politics; SECT. http://global.factiva.com/redir/default.aspx?P=sa&an=NYTF000020160316ec3g0007k&cat=a &ep=ASE.

Meckler, Laura. “Democrat Tightens Grip on Top Spot.” The Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230091185900839942074860 8744.

———. “Election 2016: Clinton Fights for a Win in Kentucky --- The Democrat Looks to Snap Sander’s Streak While Keeping an Eye on Republican Trump.” The Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230091478850788523972005 8864.

———. “Election 2016: Obama Says Clinton Is Ready for the Job --- Campaign Hopes the President Can Help Rally Democratic Voters to Her Side.” The Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230091718450420222260531 4747.

———. “Election 2016: Sanders Keeps Up Heat on Clinton.” The Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230091991910184212112619 02792.

———. “Trump, Sanders Roll in N.H. --- Clinton Defeat Prompts Retooling.” The Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230092576550686942145979 5949.

Meckler, Laura, and Janet Hook. “Democrats Seek Unity With Ouster.” The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230092883290373497770907 14786.

———. “Election 2016: Clinton Seeks Momentum in California Race.” The Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230093165390984676615269 1316.

Meckler, Laura, and Colleen McCain Nelson. “Election 2016: As Sanders Wins, Clinton Looks Ahead.” The Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230093825280111075799506 75606.

———. “Election 2016: Clinton Is Taking Fire From Two Rivals.” The Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2016. https://global-factiva-

79 com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230093995530947436088312 1957.

———. “Election 2016: Democrats Rally Ahead of Votes.” The Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230097164830647900615699 396.

———. “Trump, Clinton Power Ahead --- Democrat’s Big Night Widens Her Imposing Lead Over Sanders.” The Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230097416510490706592646 6412.

Milbank, Dana. “Too Satisfied to Feel the Bern.” The Washington Post, March 2, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. Editorial-Opinion. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230097866860592038997383 8318.

———. “Why the Democrats Fear Sanders.” The Washington Post, February 21, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. Editorial-Opinion. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230098024200937908430998 1318.

Monkovic, Toni. “How Delegate Rules Explain Your Political Party.” The New York Times, March 17, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230098227780449511180149 37597.

Nader, Ralph. “Bernie Had to Crash the Party.” The Washington Post, March 27, 2016, FINAL edition, sec. Outlook. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230098419380727491460409 3101.

Nelson, Colleen McCain. “Election 2016: Clinton Crosses Threshold To Secure Nomination.” The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230098610570292004367074 596.

Nelson, Colleen McCain. “Election 2016: Clinton Happy to Get Support of Party Brass.” The Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230099036740093223171762 08816.

Nelson, Colleen McCain, and Janet Adamy. “Clinton Wins Historic Nomination --- For Some Women, Gender Isn’t Enough.” The Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230099405990109119453199 99938.

Nelson, Colleen McCain, and Rebecca Ballhaus. “Democrats Push to Quell Revolt.” The Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2016. https://global-factiva-

80 com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230099598370693690956584 3299.

Nelson, Colleen McCain, and Valerie Bauerlein. “Election 2016: Clinton Looks to Set a Southern Tone.” The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230099757690289433230893 5339.

Nelson, Colleen McCain, and Laura Meckler. “Clinton in Tight Race In Kentucky; Sanders Wins Oregon.” The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230099927140066745084480 76122.

Nelson, Colleen McCain, and Laura Meckler. “Democrats Settle In For Long Contest.” The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230100227800573125124895 106.

———. “Sanders Scores Michigan Upset.” The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2016. https://global- factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230100392240414673057820 81954.

Nelson, Colleen McCain, and Peter Nicholas. “The Democratic Convention: Progressive Wing to Take Center Stage --- Sanders to Stress Democratic Unity on Monday and Push for Measures He Backed.” The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230100626960748702098203 8349.

Nelson, Colleen McCain, Peter Nicholas, and Laura Meckler. “Clinton Makes History With Win.” The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230100783230772795031927 781.

Neumann, William. “Closed Primary Sidelines Some Sanders Supporters.” The New York Times, April 17, 2016, Late Edition-Final edition, sec. National Desk; SECTA. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230100955750673819650160 6232.

Nicholas, Peter. “Clinton Takes Command of A Changed Party --- Democrats Are More Liberal than Those Who Helped Elect Her Husband in 1992.” The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230101135220792405667635 5821.

———. “Sanders Camp Is Split Over Next Step.” The Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230101666840371136867504 59474.

81 ———. “The Democratic Convention: Sen. Sanders to Serve Term as Independent.” The Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2016. https://global-factiva- com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/ha/default.aspx#./!?&_suid=15230101835830959556743137 6215.

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Graphs:

Graph 1: page 23

Graph 2: page 32

Graph 3: page 36

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