Sanders upsets Clinton in Indiana
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Presidential election in Indiana, 2016
 Date: November 8, 2016 |
Winner: Donald Trump (R) Hillary Clinton (D) • Jill Stein (G) • Gary Johnson (L) • Vice presidential candidates |
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May 4, 2016
Just when all the momentum in the 2016 Democratic presidential nominating race seemed to be with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his supporters showed that they’re not quite ready to fold their tent by snatching another primary victory in Indiana. With almost all of the precincts reporting, Sanders defeated Clinton by about five percentage points.
| Indiana Democratic Primary, 2016 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Candidate | Vote % | Votes | Delegates | |
 Bernie Sanders |
52.5% | 335,074 | 44 | |
| Hillary Clinton | 47.5% | 303,705 | 39 | |
| Totals | 638,779 | 83 | ||
| Source: Indiana Secretary of State and The New York Times | ||||
Sanders carried 73 of the state’s 92 counties. Clinton won 18 and one, Dubois County on the southeastern border with Ohio, was tied. Clinton won Lake County and Marion County, barely, which have relatively large numbers of black voters. Once again, the racial divide in Democratic primary voting resurfaced: According to the television networks’ exit polls, a representative sampling of Indiana primary voters as they left their precinct polling stations, Sanders won almost three-out-five white voters, while Clinton carried almost three-out-of-four black voters.
Age splits continued to divide the Democratic presidential primary electorate: according to the exit poll, Sanders won roughly four-out-five of the youngest cohort of voters, those aged 17-to-24; Clinton carried seniors, those 65 and over, by roughly two-to-one. Not surprisingly, Sanders’ three strongest counties were around the state’s two premier college campuses: He carried Monroe County, home to Indiana University, by almost two-to-one, as well as adjacent Owen County. He won more than three-out-of-votes in Tippecanoe County, home to Purdue University.
Sanders carried the ring of suburban counties around Indianapolis, as well as older manufacturing communities like Allen County (Fort Wayne), Delaware County (Muncie), Howard County (Kokomo) and Grant County (Marion). He also won most of the rural counties in the state except for several along the Ohio River on the state’s southern border with Kentucky.
One of the issues that may have driven the Democratic outcome in Indiana is the antipathy towards the world of high finance in a state where unemployment soared to double digits for 18 months during the Great Recession. When asked whether “Wall Street” did more to “help the U.S. economy” or “hurt the U.S. economy,” by more than a two-to-one margin, Indiana Democratic primary voters said it “hurt.” Among those who said it helped, Clinton won about 64 percent of those primary voters. Among those who said it hurt, Sanders won 62 percent.
Ironically, while Sanders has often declared that he will win in states if there is a large turnout in states, he won Indiana where turnout took a steep fall from the remarkable record of 1,278,314 ballots cast in 2008. When all the votes are counted in this year’s contest, only about 630,000 are likely to be tallied. That number would also be lower than the 716,955 who voted in the 1984 Indiana Democratic presidential primary, a spirited three-way race between Walter Mondale, Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson.
James A. Barnes is a senior writer for Ballotpedia and co-author of the 2016 edition of the Almanac of American Politics. He is a member of the CNN Decision Desk and will help to project the Democratic and Republican winners throughout the election cycle.
See also
- Presidential candidates, 2016
- Presidential debates (2015-2016)
- Presidential election, 2016/Polls
- 2016 presidential candidate ratings and scorecards
- Presidential election, 2016/Straw polls
