Your Democratic Primary Candidate Power Rankings: Post 'em here.

Wow, I displayed the numbers ‘out of order’!

Wow, you really got the goods on me.

Yes, I think Yang isn’t a serious candidate, so I left him last in the order for a few weeks, even though his numbers were surpassing Beto’s and Booker’s.

Oh my, that demonstrates my lack of integrity!

True, but that’s up to you. Not to mention, there ARE other polling averages out there, nobody here has to rely on mine alone. I even linked to them, and I’ve been comparing my averages to theirs for several weeks now.

Well, I didn’t. But you keep flogging this deceased equine.

I’m done with you and the bullshit you bring up. It just isn’t worth any more time than I’ve already thrown at it.

Another voice of appreciation for what you’ve contributed here and for the objectivity and transparency with which you’ve done it RTF. As well as of course the work!

I have to admit I was initially thinking that H&R was tongue in cheek self-mocking their obsession with Yang … but onwards!
I don’t know about the race being frozen (even if ends up not moving much). Warren is now becoming the clear front-runner and will over the next few weeks take some of the heat that comes with that position as that narrative becomes more popularly understood. Biden is hamstrung some as it is harder to sell being strongest against Trump without undermining confidence in a successful impeachment/conviction process. Sanders will hang on to his floor as long as he brings his energy level to the next debate (and I think he will) but if not then yes Yang poaches some of his support (a point or two). Not enough to be of real note but to be in same level of insignificance as Harris has become.

I fear 2022 and 2024 are going to be tough in any case. Trump will be leaving an economy starting to decline with no tools to fix it and an existing huge debt, and huge international distrust of the United States as a partner going forward. The disaster he is creating with having greenlit Turkey’s actions will haunt the next president and even the one after. But the public will hold the person in charge then as responsible and want change again. A Nikki Haley, for example, would be tough against anyone in that position.

Yes, 2022 and 2024 are likely to be our Waterloo. But some candidates have a better chance to weather that storm than others.

It’s a sign of how desperate I’m getting for a solid alternative to the top three that after Klobuchar’s strong debate performance, I have gone from “she’s dead to me” to “go, Amy, go!”

Thanks! Gotta say, once I set up my spreadsheet and my text file the way I wanted, it’s been surprisingly easy. And fun, too - and it gives me a place to stand on to critique the other two polling averages. Which this week, I will. :slight_smile:

It was clear last night that her rivals now see her as the front-runner. As you’ll see from this week’s numbers, I’m not ready to say that just yet.

I think the Dems will need to look back at 1994 and 2010, and understand why they got hammered those years. The midterms are always a challenge for the party in power, but there’s a lot of room between modest losses and catastrophic losses. The key, IMHO, is to make people’s lives better in tangible ways, remind them of it, and remind them that the other party wants to take those things away.

And it’s Wednesday, the latest YouGov polling is up, so here we go.

Only a couple of carry-overs from last time: the Fox News and IBD-TIPP polls haven’t aged out yet. Other than that, we’ve got a fresh Quinnipiac poll, and our three regulars: YouGov, Morning Consult, and HarrisX. The rather sparse number of polls makes this week a bit shaky in terms of how much I’d want to depend on it, but where the numbers showed the same thing before and after a passel of polls (Monmouth, Emerson, Ipsos) recently aged out, I feel a bit more confident.

Anyhow, the numbers:


Candidate  Date  8/14  8/21  8/28  9/04  9/12  9/18  9/25  10/2  10/9 10/15

Biden            30.1  28.6  28.5  29.8  26.5  28.5  28.4  27.6  26.2  28.7
Warren           17.0  16.2  16.8  19.0  17.6  18.6  21.5  22.4  25.0  25.4
Sanders          17.1  15.2  16.9  16.0  17.9  16.9  16.8  16.4  15.3  13.6
Buttigieg         5.6   4.7   4.7   5.2   5.0   5.7   5.8   5.6   5.2   6.0
Harris            8.2   7.2   7.2   6.8   6.6   5.6   5.2   5.1   4.2   4.4
Yang                    2.0   2.5   2.6   2.5   2.8   3.0   2.9   3.1   2.4
O'Rourke          2.6   2.7   2.1   1.4   3.0   3.0   2.4   2.4   1.6   2.1

Everyone else < 2.0.

Worth mentioning that Beto once again bounced back from a week under 2.0, so he’s still here, but Booker didn’t, so he’s not.

And the comparison with other averages:


Candidate  Average RTF   RCP  Econ

Biden             28.7  29.4  25.0
Warren            25.4  23.4  27.0
Sanders           13.6  15.4  15.0
Buttigieg          6.0   5.6   6.0
Harris             4.4   5.2   5.0
Yang               2.4   2.2   3.0
O'Rourke           2.1   2.8   2.0

Uh oh. Yang ain’t treading water no more! His numbers plummeted by over 20%. Stick a fork in him, he’s done.

:stuck_out_tongue:

Looking at the other two averages, I’m pretty uncomfortable with both of them, and all of a sudden I’m glad to be doing my own average, just to have an independent assessment of where the race is. Because both of them seem to be kinda lopsided in the polls they rely on right now, just in opposite directions.

I’ll start with The Economist’s average, which has Warren up by 2. If you click through, you’ll see that 5 of the most recent 10 polls in their average are YouGov polls. And I’m hardly the only observer who’s noticed that YouGov has a pretty visible pro-Warren house effect, compared to other pollsters. (The Economist is the sponsor of YouGov’s weekly poll, btw.)

They also “include only surveys from pollsters who conduct their interviews over the phone with a live interviewer—rather than with automated machine recording—or that use rigorous and well-documented online methods” which is a reasonable standard, which apparently neither Morning Consult nor HarrisX live up to, since they’re not included at all in The Economist’s average. (I’m rather suspicious of both outfits for various reasons, but I don’t feel I’d be on solid ground to exclude them due to those suspicions.) Since they both have heavy pro-Biden leans (and MC has a big pro-Sanders lean too), that makes a difference.

Which brings me to RCP, which suddenly has Biden up by 6. They weight all their polls equally, and two of their five polls right now are HarrisX and Morning Consult, with their heavy pro-Biden leans (MC hasn’t had Biden below 31% since April, and HarrisX currently has Biden at 35% and Warren at 17%, which is not unusual for them) and low 538 ratings.

So these two iffy polls count 40% of their average right now; due to downweighting for being B- and C-rated polls per 538, they count 18% of my average this week, and they’re only that high because of how few recent polls there have been.

As far as my own average is concerned, I think Biden’s 28.7% is a fluke of the scarce polls, and I’d bet his average will drop a point or two once the post-debate polling is published. Warren’s probably about right, midway between the other two.

But I think I have it right, and both of them are wrong, on Bernie’s drop, and how far Harris is down now. My sense from the polls is that Bernie’s heart attack is costing him some of his less intense fans. And I don’t know what the deal is with Harris, but she’s sinking. I’m surprised (not so much now specifically, but rather on an ongoing basis), because I expected her to be more formidable a candidate than she’s been.

I think Harris has had an authenticity problem.

CNN now has Warren as a clear front-runner. This is very bad. I like Warren a lot, but in a general election Warren is going to attract such a groundswell of hostility from the corporatocracy and many moderates that even a totally disgraced Trump will get propelled to a second term. I’d love to see a Warren presidency but thinking it will happen seems like sheer naivety. Has everyone forgotten that the main objective is to prevent the orange menace from being re-elected to another four years of chaos and even further radicalization of the Supreme Court?

Yes, I have. Of course, I never remembered it in the first place.

The main objective, AFAIAC, is to do what it takes to keep global warming from going out of control. This will require (a) winning the White House, (b) winning the Senate, and (c) getting rid of the filibuster. Plus some damned good fortune even after that.

Since even a barely Dem-controlled Senate isn’t likely to ditch the filibuster without being pushed hard on it, a precondition for (c) is that we nominate a candidate who will do that pushing. That means Warren or Harris.

If we don’t rein global warming in, then AFAIAC the rest is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

So the way I figure it, either we nominate Warren or Harris, or we lose. We ALL lose. Big time.

We may still lose even if we nominate one of them and she wins the election, but at least we’ll go into 2021 with a chance of winning. Otherwise, no.

Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: the idea that it doesn’t really matter whether we have President Trump for four more years or a moderate Democrat (because electing the latter would just be “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”) is truly mindblowing and appalling.

I see no reason to believe that your feelings on this (or the feelings of any random internet person) are any more likely to be valid than a wild guess. Maybe you’re right, or maybe you’re wrong, but at this point you’re just guessing. The same arguments were made about Barack Obama, and even Donald Trump. We just don’t know yet.

I’m still amazed that random internet people still think that they just happen to have a line into the American consciousness and have more than a 50-50 understanding of what’s going to happen.

Newsflash: you don’t. Doesn’t matter who you are. You don’t know, this early, and neither does anyone else. Even Nate Silver doesn’t know. You’re just guessing. It’s fine that you have feelings (I have feelings too!), but you’re being profoundly and stubbornly foolish if you believe that anyone else should treat your feelings as anything more than a wild guess from a stranger.

Yeah, I’m totally OK with my son and his entire generation spending most of their lives in a hellscape of a world, as long as Trump loses.

Seriously, fuck that shit.

Yeah, but at least the Democratic party has learned from its mistakes. In 2016, we listened to the leftists and ran the visionary candidate, forsaking the choice that was the mainstream moderate party choice. We emphasized a grand vision candidate over a safe candidate, and look at how we lost.

So by all means let’s go back to the strategy that worked so well in 2008, and choose the safe moderate candidate over the candidate that inspires people.

I think it’s time to squeeze Yang, Steyer, Castro, and some others out of the debates. I wanna see more Klobuchar.

What is Klobuchar’s appeal exactly? What does she say and do that none of the other candidates can? She has no personal charisma whatsoever. She at least doesn’t stammer over her words constantly like Biden, but she’s like the exact opposite of “authoritative.” Even Warren, who I have made no secret of disliking and who I don’t think can beat Trump, has a little bit of “authority” in her demeanor. Klobuchar just seems spaced out and kind of like the whole thing is a lark for her.

Steyer is pathetic and utterly forgettable. A billionaire who’s running for President should at least be savvy enough at campaigning and presentation to be memorable. For him to have a shot in hell, he would need to have made everyone in America aware of exactly who he is, how he made his money, what he looks like, and what his general political stance is, when they hear the words “Tom Steyer.” I guarantee you that they don’t. Most people, if asked, would draw a blank. If you are a billionaire, running for president, and in this position, it means you’re already a failure.

It is possible to be pound wise but penny foolish. If Trump gets a few more Supreme picks, how do you think your climate change legislation might fare?

Interesting how Andy, in two consecutive posts before this one, castigated Democratic pragmatists for voicing the same types of concerns you will hear from David Axelrod, who as I have said should have more credibility than pretty much any human alive. For that matter, Barack Obama himself has expressed similar concerns. But Andy says we have no idea what will happen, so we should shut up. However, he does not apparently have any such qualms about a prediction (which sounds more like the confident expression of metaphysical certainty) that electing someone like Biden, Booker, or Klobuchar instead of Warren will lead straight to a “hellscape”. No sir, that’s just common sense! :rolleyes:

RTF, it’s amazing to me that you are the same person who calmly and coolly weights and aggregates poll numbers. I’ve never seen these two kinds of posting styles go together in one poster before.

I’m trying to come up with the circumstance that the Dems get climate change legislation through Congress and override Trump’s veto while Trump is putting more Justices on the Supreme Court.