Trump and Sanders

A little more than a week ago, I read a number of articles saying that Bernie Sanders's run this year was like Trump's in 2016--a populist outsider pushing aside a divided and demoralized opposition.  In the last few days, the story has changed to the Democratic establishment doing what the Republican establishment couldn't do--uniting to stop the progress of a populist outsider. 

These stories led me to wonder whether Sanders and Trump had any common appeal in 2016.  There were some anecdotal accounts of people who liked both, but I hadn't seen any systematic evidence.  One reason is that during the primaries, most surveys ask Republicans about the Republican candidates and Democrats about the Democratic candidates. However, I found a CNN/ORC survey from Feb 24-7, 2016 that asked everyone about both Democratic and Republican contenders, plus a few other political figures.  Specifically, it asked whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion about:  Michael Bloomberg (who was being mentioned as a possible independent candidate), Ben Carson, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump (also Melania Trump, but I left her out). 

I computed correlations among the ratings of all of these people.  The correlations of the ratings of each Republican candidate with Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Sanders:

                       Bill             Hillary             Sanders
Carson            -.32              -.38                  -.27
Kasich            -.05              -.13                  -.06
Rubio             -.27              -.32                  -.19
Cruz               -.30              -.33                  -.29
Trump            -.30               -.39                 -.28

There is no sign of affinity between views of Trump and views of Sanders.  The negative correlation between views of Sanders and Trump was smaller than the negative correlation between views of Hillary Clinton and Trump, but the same pattern held for all Republican candidates.  The most likely reason Hillary had a stronger negative association than Sanders was simply that she was more familiar and was the front-runner for the nomination.  Kasich stands out as having smaller negative correlations; presumably that's because he was regarded as more of a centrist. 

I did a few factor analyses and found one major factor that could be interpreted as partisanship.  There was a second factor that could be interpreted as Trump vs. everyone else, or Trump vs. all other Republicans, but nothing suggesting common liking for Trump and Sanders.

The survey also asked which of the candidates could handle various issues the best.  I looked at the two where a Trump/Sanders affinity seemed most likely:  economics and immigration.  That is, to the extent that people saw both as trying to "protect American workers," they might have liked Sanders on the economy and Trump on immigration (or vice versa).  That was not the case--once you took out the tendency to like the same candidate on both issues, the only substantial pattern was partisan:  Democrats tended to like the other Democrat on the other issue and Republicans liked another Republican. 

Of course, it's possible to think of ways in which Trump and Sanders are similar (and ways in which they are different), but it seems that by late February, people were not treating them as having anything in common. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]