At FiveThirtyEight, Harry Enten notes that the "very liberal" faction of the
Democratic party has grown since 2008:
Interestingly, the Democratic electorate has shimmied to the left roughly equally in the South and outside the South. The very liberal percentage of the Mississippi vote, for example, was up 12 percentage points, while it was up 15 points in Nevada. Voters outside the South were only slightly more likely to identify as very liberal (nearly 27 percent) than voters overall. So why did Sanders still do so poorly in the South? Black voters accounted for a much larger percentage of the very liberal vote in Southern states.
But there is an important qualification:
The fact that Sanders will likely lose the nomination, however, isn’t simply about race; the Democratic electorate is more liberal, but it’s still not all that liberal in an absolute sense. Moderate and conservative Democrats still form a larger base in most states than very liberal voters.
