I didn’t mean they were unimportant, but I remember Bernie Sanders nearly beating Clinton in Iowa and crushing her in NH, but Clinton pulled away after that. Pat Buchanan beat Bob Dole in Iowa - Dole cruised after that. It’s common sense that if you want to win a nomination, you want to be very competitive and ideally win one of the two first races, but a poll at this early stage showing Biden and Sanders tied doesn’t mean that much to me.
What is a concern is that Biden just looks like he’s running a very low energy campaign right now. It looks like he’s just trying to do what Hillary Clinton did and run out the clock, and I seriously doubt that’s going to work. If Biden starts to look old and tired, he will collapse quickly. The advantage Biden has is that he’s electable. There’s nothing electable about old and tired.
Yeah, sometimes I wonder if some of the people telling pollsters they support one or the other of these guys, based on their being the only names they are familiar with, have actually taken a good look at either of them in 2019. They definitely look way, way past their salad days.
None of these polls means much right now - wait until people see them on TV responding to hard questions, responding to attacks, and attacking other candidates. That’s when you need to start watching the polls.
We can debate the value of Google trends data, but if you compare Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden, something interesting jumps out, which is that Harris is getting a lot of search interest in very large southern and mid-Atlantic states, from Virginia all the way to Texas, and she’s getting interest in California, of course. Bernie seems to dominate the rest of the states, and then there’s Joe Biden who’s not getting a lot of search interest at all. This would seem to be evidence, however insignificant it might be, that supports the idea that Biden is a front runner, but people aren’t really excited to vote for him.
ETA: Bernie still bests Harris in Florida - at least for now.
While don’t disagree with the conclusion (many are not “excited” about Biden, even though he is their first choice for lack of any that so far seem better, and a few that seem much worse), yeah, I’ll disagree about the quality of the evidence. Biden is the comfortable pair of well worn shoes. Not only no need to learn about them, but the people really liking these shoes are not the ones who are shopping online as much.
I think Biden’s candidacy will be an interesting test of the power of the left punditocracy which clearly doesn’t like him very much and much prefers someone like Warren. The right punditocracy did not like Trump either and couldn’t do much about it but my sense is that Dem primary voters are less anti-establishment and more likely to pay attention to what prominent left commentators are saying. So I am wondering how Biden’s numbers will survive month after month of mediocre to negative commentary. Also my sense is that Biden will struggle to gain new voters he doesn’t already have or regain voters that he loses. So the 35% he has now may well be a ceiling and if he slowly leaks voters and goes to 25% he may struggle to recover. The debates will obviously be key. If Biden performs well and still stays at 35% after a few debates, his candidacy will look very strong.
Yeah, those one-on-ones are very powerful evidence that there is no significant “stop Biden” constituency. This blows away the hope many have that once the field narrows, opposition will coalesce around one alternative.
It’s an interesting hypothesis. One big flaw: Trump was an incoherent buffoon who had never run for office before or served in the military (STDs were “his Vietnam”), who attacked conservative orthodoxy and party elders. Biden, by contrast, is a very recent vice president and longyime senator. Democrats in the post-Civil War era have never seen a vice president subsequently run for president and not get nominated on his first attempt. Republicans have seen this happen at least once (Quayle: I haven’t checked as extensively for more examples).
Obviously I don’t think Biden is anything like Trump as a whole. I just think there are some interesting parallels in that he is the early leader like Trump and he also doesn’t seem to be much liked by his party’s pundits and I wonder how that will play out. In the case of Trump I very much thought that conservative pundit opposition would weaken and eventually defeat his candidacy once the race was winnowed down to a few candidates but obviously that didn’t happen. I think his victory proved that conservative pundits were weaker in their own party than many people had thought and 2020 may be a similar test for the pundits of the left.
The one-on-ones are a valid data point but you have to figure that name recognition plays a big role at this point. I am pretty sure Hillary would have beaten Obama handily one-on-one at this stage in 2007. One or two candidates are bound to rise in stature over the next six months especially with the debates. But the other issue is of course how quickly the race gets winnowed down. Both Bernie and Warren seem to be quite strong and my guess is both will stay in for quite a while which is definitely to Biden’s advantage.
On thinking more about Biden and Trump in their respective primaries I think there are four points: two similarities and two differences:
Both Trump and Biden have an early lead in the polls. Biden’s numbers are even more impressive since IIRC Trump’s favorability numbers in 2015 weren’t very good.
2)In both cases the pundit class in the party dislikes the candidate, intensely so in the case of Trump and mildly in the case of Biden.
The relevant party establishment was solidly against Trump in 2015 but is perfectly fine with Biden today.
4)Trump really lit a fire in his base with his message and his personality. I just don’t see a comparable level of enthusiasm for Biden.
1,2,3 favor Biden in comparison to Trump but arguably in this political era, 4 is the most important of all.
Turns out, the author of the piece just happened, today, to accept the job as the official spokesperson for the President of The Ukraine beating, by her admission, 4,000 candidates for the job.
I’m sure it’s all just a big ol’ coincidence. Or a part of the application and interviewing process. I can’t decide which… someone want to offer me some guidance here?
It’s fine. I actually like mouthy outbursts like that. Those people have no idea how effective it is at galvanizing people against what they advocate. No idea.