The 5 Key Constituencies of the Democratic Primary

Nate Silver sees five key groups of Democratic voters that matter in the 2020 Democratic primary:

1. Party Loyalists
2. The Left
3. Millennials and Friends
4. Black voters
5. Hispanic voters (sometimes in combination with Asian voters)

“You’ll notice that these groups aren’t mutually exclusive… So rather than thinking about ‘lanes,’ we’re taking a more pluralistic approach with the Democrats. Candidates don’t have to pick any one group; rather, their goal is to build a majority coalition from voters in (at least) three out of the five groups. There are a lot of ways to do this: If you’re choosing any three from among the five groups, there are 10 possible combinations to pick from,2 and all of them plausibly form winning coalitions.”

“The other difference from how we handled the Republicans four years ago is that, with the exception of The Left, none of these groups are explicitly ideological in nature.”