Last Call For Numbers Games

Remember, Donald Trump is getting a lot of attention for a guy at 21% or so.  More people support Bernie Sanders, but you wouldn't know it from our media. The Fix's Philip Bump to his credit does the math.

For all of the attention paid to the Republican primary -- thanks in large part to the classy marquee name of Donald Trump -- it's worth pointing something out: More Americans currently support Hillary Clinton than Trump, which you probably already knew. But it's safe to assume that more Americans alsosupport Bernie Sanders. 

We looked at this a bit back in May, when the Sanders phenomenon was first emerging. But it's worth revisiting now that he has surged. 

If you extrapolate Census turnout estimates into 2016, we can figure that some 137 million will turn out to vote next year. That's maybe a bit high, but it doesn't really matter. It gives us a figure to work with. 

In September, Gallup did its regular assessment of how Americans identify politically. The number who said they were Democrats or Republicans was the same, 27 percent. The rest were "independents," though a number of those independents leaned toward one party or the other. (This is not uncommon at all.) 

Those partisanship figures change a lot, but let's use them as-is. If we apply those percentages to the 137 million people that vote, assuming (unfairly) that partisans vote at even rates, we get about 37 million people in each party, about 25 million Republican-leaning independents and about 23 million Democratic-leaning ones. 

If we then apply polling averages to those numbers, we get a look at how many people (generally) support each candidate. Note that the ratios below don't change even if the numbers of voters change; it's a percent of a percent. But the upshot is this: More Americans support Sanders than Trump.

Both demographics and electoral college politics favor the Democrats in 2016, and the GOP knows it.

If only our liberal media would do a better job of remembering that.