[3] Some analysts, such as Economist data journalist G. Elliott Morris, have argued that these voters disproportionately impacted the 2016 election.
[1][4] Others, including political scientist Brian Schaffner, who served as a co-Principal Investigator in the CCES survey,[5] have said that Trump's margin of victory was small enough that Sanders–Trump voters were merely one voting bloc out of many that could have decided the outcome, and that "defections" between a primary and a general election are quite common.
[1] Writing in RealClearPolitics, Tim Chapman, executive director of conservative advocacy group Heritage Action, suggested that both Trump and Sanders had strong populist appeal, especially to working-class voters in the heartland, despite their starkly different policies.
[8] In 2020, Schaffner suggested that Sanders' appeal to Sanders–Trump voters in 2016 was due to his outsider status, his populist policies, and his targeting of issues which affected groups of people Trump attempted to court in his 2016 campaign.
According to a February 2020 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, about 7% of respondents who said they were enthusiastic about or comfortable with Sanders in the 2020 election voted for Trump in 2016.
In March 2019, Grace Sparks of CNN suggested that Sanders–Trump voters were unlikely to be significant in 2020, pointing to early polling which showed little overlap in support between Sanders and Trump.
[9] A March 2020 Morning Consult poll showed that although Sanders supporters were less likely to vote for Biden than the average Democrat, they were also less likely to "defect" to Trump compared to 2016.