Maybe. I suspect it’s all downhill from here for Sanders. Maybe that’s just hopeful thinking on my part. I don’t have any particular love (or hate) for Warren. But I think she’ll one of the top 2 or 3 contenders in 6 months.
It’s a difficult question to answer at best, and might be impossible.
The obvious answer is “a big threat” and “also a big threat” because, as the pundits like to put it, the two of them occupy similar ideological space. Both are strongly anti-Wall Street, anti-big corporations; both are clearly among the more radical candidates running for the nomination, and their ideas overlap quite a bit. In this formulation, there’s a large group of voters in a bucket marked “Fiercely Anti-Big Business,” and it’s left to Warren and Sanders to divide the voters in that bucket any way they can. A Sanders supporter who sours on Sanders will therefore go to Warren; a Warren supporter’s second choice will almost invariably be Sanders.
Trouble is, there’s not a lot of evidence that voters are all that ideological in their thinking. I always think of the statistic about the folks who voted for Gene McCarthy in one of the early primaries in 1968 (this anecdote came from my mom, a grad student in political science at the time, and she could never remember whether it was the NH or the MA primary). Since McCarthy was not on the fall ballot, what did they do? Well, some stayed home, and some voted for Humphrey, and some wrote in McCarthy or somebody else, and some voted for Nixon–but the greatest number, not a majority but a plurality, voted for George Wallace. Suggesting that ideology was not the main reason for their pro-McCarthy votes.
In this particular case the two candidates are different in style, background, and much more. I suspect there are a lot of Warren supporters who really want a woman as the nominee and will tend to support Harris or Klobuchar if Warren drops out rather than going to Sanders. Some voters are drawn to Warren’s academic background, knowledge base, and detailed policy proposals; others find it a turnoff. Warren is more of a let’s-work-together-within-the-system old-school politician, while Sanders is more of a blow-it-up kind of a guy. If age is a big concern you might not be voting for either, but you might also note that Warren is eight years younger than Sanders and would end her second term at the same age (79) at which Sanders would begin his first. And so on. It’s quite realistic for a voter to have one of them listed at #1 and the other at #5, say.
So I don’t think it’s anywhere near as simple as “Two candidates with similar ideologies, matched in a zero-sum game.” Guess we’ll see.
This is an Ann Selzer poll, who is one of the best in the business. Anything with her name on it, I take seriously.
The way I parse those responses makes me think I should learn a lot more about Kamala Harris.
The way the primary schedule works this year may work to Harris’ advantage. I don’t think Harris will win Iowa or New Hampshire - but maybe she doesn’t have to. If she can finish respectably in Iowa and/or NH and then compete well and possibly win in Nevada, she might be in a position to have an impact on Super Tuesday, and unlike past years, California’s a part of that equation.
We won’t really know much about anything until after the debates. By the end of summer, we’ll have a much better sense of how this race is going.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Iowa a caucus state, where candidates who don’t get 15% of the vote in a precinct are eliminated, and the process continues until the only candidates who “win” (receive delegates) have at least 15% of that precinct’s votes? If that’s the case, being everyone’s second choice in a field of 20 could be a very good thing.
If so, it’ll be a first.
I’m going to have to take a middle course between DSeid’s ‘things aren’t going to change much from where they are now’ (from the ‘Biden’s In’ thread) and your “We won’t really know much about anything until after the debates.” We know a great deal already, but much can still change.
I never said that it was a bad or unreliable poll. But every poll has error in it. And that includes the good polls: In fact, any reputable poll will tell you their best estimate of just how much error they have. Nor is there anything magical about “within the margin of error”: The errors will follow some sort of bell-shaped distribution, so you’ll sometimes have some polls which, through no fault whatsoever on the part of the pollster, will have results somewhat outside of the margin of error. And so you’ll get a better picture of the race by averaging many pollsters together than you will from any single poll. Even a mix of good and bad polls is better than a single good poll, provided that you weight the averages appropriately. And so a single poll that looks good for a particular candidate, even a single poll of very high quality, doesn’t mean much when the average of all polls paints a very different picture.
Still, keep in mind that all Democratic primaries allocate delegates proportionally. Trump was able to start amassing delegates with winner take all and winner take most states where he’d win a small plurality and the rest of the Republican vote was split.
From the “Biden’s In” thread:
In those same polls I listed above, Sanders’ advantage over Warren is 5, 3, and 11%, in that order.
Bill Clinton didn’t get any delegates in Iowa and though he finished with a New Hampshire delegate split, he finished 9 percentage points behind the leader, Tsongas. He didn’t win his first race until March.
Having said that, there’s no question that candidates desperately want the campaign to get off to a good start so that they can build momentum going into the March primaries.
There effectively was no Iowa on the Dem side in 1992. Everyone skipped Iowa, and let Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin have all the delegates.
In every year, in either major party, where Iowa and New Hampshire have both been in play, no candidate has won his/her party’s nomination without winning one of the two.
ETA: Just in case you’re wondering if this is some entirely retrospective cherry-picking of a pattern, I’ve been writing about this here at the Dope since 2007. It’s had five chances to be wrong since then (six, if you include Obama’s uncontested renomination in 2012, which I don’t), and it keeps on being the case.
Yup. Iowa is pretty key (and NH too) and the Selzer poll showing Sanders dropping from 25 to 16% while Warren went up from 9 to 15% is pretty damning for Sanders.
In terms of threat to each other … well if one or the other dropped out probably the other would pick up a good portion of the other’s support, but not all of it. Some who love Sanders dislike Warren and visa versa. Some would fall back to the default (Biden).
In any case they are essentially tied in Iowa now with Sanders dropping there significantly. Neither will be dropping out so to the degree they are splitting the same voting pool it is not going to change. Sanders has a floor (that 538 estimates is 8%), so max Warren could pick up is 8 from him to maybe 23ish. That theoretically could give her a shot at it. If she got all of his defectors and none went elsewhere, especially to Biden. Which some would.
How often has someone who has not been first or second in Iowa won NH, when both were in play?
1988 anyway. Gephardt and Simon were one and two in Iowa with Dukakis third, but NH had it Dukakis, Gephardt, and Simon 1, 2, and 3.
So not being second in Iowa maybe is not quite the death knell I though it was.
Interesting yougov poll results. https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/b0wzlf9avh/econTabReport.pdf
Biden pretty flat but Warren and Sanders have flipped. Now Warren the higher 16 to 12. Was reversed Sanders above Warren 16 to 11 previous week. Just one polling house and one result but still. It looks more like Warren is the more likely to emerge as the Biden challenger of that younger whiter progressive demographic.
Make it two polls: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/448180-biden-warren-lead-in-nevada-sanders-behind-in-third-poll
In Nevada, Warren with 19%, Sanders at 13%. (Biden’s at 36%.)
Feeling like a trend.
Sanders may be in some serious trouble. He doesn’t seem like the kind of candidate that can really use the debates to overcome a big deficit either. His whole campaign is about authenticity, and being the true progressive. The danger all along is that someone like Warren would come along and take some of that energy away from him, and that may be what’s happening. And this time, I think being an independent and caucusing as a Democrat isn’t going to work for him. Warren is both a loyal Democrat and a bona fide progressive.
Yeah, I’m not sure about that, Chronos. There are polls in Iowa where they’re essentially neck and neck and where Warren has gained ground while Bernie has lost ground.
I do believe it’s true that they’re cannibalizing each other to some extent and both need Biden to implode pretty badly if they want to move into the top spot.
In the latest Seltzer of Iowa it’s
Biden 24
Bernie 16
Warren 15
Buttigieg 14
Ditto New Hampshire. The last Tel survey was:
Biden 33
Sanders 12
Warren 11
Buttigieg 7
Harris 7
But that was almost a month ago.
Here where I am - South Carolina - Sanders is having a rougher time of it:
Biden 37
Sanders 10
Warren 8
Harris 7
I’d be VERY surprised if either Sanders or Warren did well down here.
half of the democratic party are now self identified liberals, and because liberals are more politically engaged than other groups in general, the % of voters who are liberal in primaries is possibly higher. Its possible that self identified liberals could be 60%+ of democratic primary voters, especially in early states.
Having said that, Warren is taking votes from Sanders, which is fine. I supported Sanders in 2016 but now am leaning towards Warren.
However I have serious caveats about her, and a lot of liberals I’ve met do too. She is not a good politician. Is she a good policy wonk? She sure is. But voters don’t care about that for the most part. Most voters can barely be bothered to get up and vote once every four years. They don’t understand what the parties stand for, let alone the difference between candidates. Only the heavily engaged 20% of voters care about that stuff. 40% of adults don’t bother to vote, and in a normal midterm its closer to 70% of eligible voters who don’t vote.
Warren would be eaten alive by Trump and the GOP when it comes to politics, and that worries me. She will try to turn the conversation back to issues, not understanding that 80% of voters don’t care about or understand issues beyond a superficial level. I think she has been ‘spoiled’ by being in Massachussetts which is an extremely democratic state, but also a highly educated state. The stuff that works there isn’t going to work with barely engaged voters who can barely be bothered to vote.
I think people want someone tough, competent and who they can connect with on an emotional level. I don’t think Warren brings that.
Biden has his perks. As a white man and a political moderate, he doesn’t scare away rural whites. He won’t win them, but he would lose them by a smaller margin than Warren. But Biden’s statement that the GOP would agree to become bipartisan after 2020 was so scarily naive that I don’t know how comfortable I am. That is the same level of naivety as when George W Bush said he could see into Putins soul and see Putin is trustworthy and is a good person.
The modern GOP has a base that is made up of angry, reactionary white nationalists who hate democracy because democracy undermines their efforts to live in a white christian ethnostate. Claiming that the GOP will come around to cooperate on health care or infrastructure is beyond idiotic and really makes me question Biden’s competence to lead.
More of interest in that yougov’s cross tabs.
Most skewed to white is Buttigieg and Warren support, even more than Sanders. Most skewed to Black and older support is Biden.
I don’t know of specific polling on this but I’d WAG that more Democratic primary voters want to see attempts at bipartisanship and optimism about it than want to vote for someone who messages that more than a third of this country are white nationalists who hate democracy. You might not think that by reading your social media feeds though. Optimism may be naive but many of us like someone with hope.
And among those who had both voted for Romney then Clinton, and those who voted Obama then Trump, I would bet that preference is overwhelmingly for having a preference for optimism about bipartisanship and a distaste for thinking of those who have voted for the GOP as evil. Dems need those voters.
Meanwhile a GOP building after a sizable Trump loss, especially if they also lose the Senate but even if not, is going to want to rebrand.