What the hell, it’s pushing 10pm Eastern, and I’ve heard no rumors of expectations of any more polls. So here we go.
We have A-rated Monmouth, Quinnipiac, and CNN polls; B-rated Emerson, Suffolk, YouGov, and Morning Consult polls, and C-rated HarrisX, with the last three being updated at least weekly, and everything else except the CNN poll having been released in the past day or two. Since last week, the Fox News poll has been the only poll to drop off due to age.
Haven’t had time to update this thread but cheers to RTF for breathing life into it. Seems like he’s on top of it all. Can’t really disagree with his rankings. Worth noting that Gillibrand dropped out. She was never a threat but she had a little more cash on hand than the other 1 percenters, so I wasn’t sure she’d drop out immediately.
Strangely, I actually came away liking Gillibrand more than I thought I would. I think she has good character, and I don’t think she has shit to apologize for re: Al Franken. I like her a lot more than I like Hickenlooper, and I say this as someone who gravitates more to the moderate/center-left than hard left.
It’s Wednesday, so I’m back with this week’s numbers. The A-rated CNN and Monmouth polls that were part of the average last week have aged out, and incoming, we have an A-rated IBD-TIPP poll and the C-rated Change Research folks are back. Continuing from last time, we have the A-rated Quinnipiac poll, the B-rated Emerson and Suffolk polls, and the most recent versions of our at-least-weekly group, the B-rated Morning Consult and YouGov polls and the C-rated HarrisX.
The numbers:
Biden 29.8
Warren 19.0
Sanders 16.0
Harris 6.8
Buttigieg 5.2
Yang 2.6
Booker 2.3
O’Rourke 1.4 (just so nobody will wonder if I left him out by accident)
Aside from the appropriately low-weighted C-rated polls (Change Research has Warren at 29 and Biden at 19, which I wish were true, but no it isn’t), Biden’s polls are all between 26 and 32; unlike when the Monmouth poll was in there, there’s no one poll pulling him up or down, so he’s about where he belongs right now.
Unless she gets some pretty bad new polls, Warren’s numbers will likely go up even further next week, when Quinnipiac and particularly Suffolk and Emerson age out of my average: they have her at 19, 14, and 15, respectively. Chances are we’ll only get one or two new polls to replace them, since everybody wanted to get their oar in by August 28, whether or not they counted towards debate qualification, while next week will be just another week. (Their disappearance, absent any new polls, would reduce both Biden’s and Sanders’ averages, but only by a fraction of a point each.)
Beto was at 0% in the new IBD poll, and that, on top of a 1% in the Q-poll, is what has him down below 2. When those three polls disappear, he’ll still be well below 2%. Unless he makes on hell of a positive impression in the September debate, he really needs to think about that Senate race in Texas. Given where he started, he’s really crashed and burned.
Same with Bullock and Montana, only more so - after all, (a) Bullock’s down at 0.2%, having straight zeroes in all the polls in my average except 1% in the Q-poll, and (b) he won’t have the opportunity of making an impression at the debate. Show us how you can win your red state, dude - we need every Senate seat we can get.
If at some point this spring it becomes clear that the nominee is going to be one of those top three (or for that matter any of the top six besides Harris), I’m going to have to basically just hide under my bed and peek at the results on November 4. I can’t handle the stomach-churning stress of watching a race between Trump and a bad Democratic nominee, and at this point at least it seems that nearly everyone in the primary electorate is determined to pick a bad one.
Ya think? If we didn’t, there would be no reason for me to despair, because all Democrats would all be in agreement about the candidates who are strongest. I’ll just note that from what I have been hearing on podcasts and on cable news while I am driving, the people who have actually run successful Democratic presidential campaigns in the past 40+ years seem to view the race as I do, even if they are more hesitant to say negative things about some of those in the top tier. They express concern about the sharp tack to the left that many have taken, see Biden as a weak frontrunner, and wonder why governors like Bullock are not getting more of a look.
Speaking of governors, I learned something yesterday that I consider highly unfair. Senators can transfer money from their Senate fundraising accounts directly into their presidential campaigns. But governors are not allowed to do that and must start from scratch. Which of course puts them at a severe disadvantage.
The front-runners in the polling are front-runners because they’re doing a better job at campaigning than the rest of the contenders. That’s why the primary is a good (but not perfect) test – the ones who campaign the best will win. By definition. But it’s still quite early, and there’s plenty of time for a governor or Senator to break out. I think Booker is most likely, since he’s the most naturally talented communicator of the bunch, IMO. But we’ll see. Right now I feel fine about Warren and Sanders, and I’d be okay with a handful of others as well (Klobuchar, Booker, and Harris, most notably).
I can’t see you, so I don’t know if you maintained a straight face while claiming that Joe Biden is campaigning more effectively, by a double digit margin, then anyone else.
We can’t really know for sure who’s doing better right now until the voting starts in Iowa (and later). But polling (and fundraising, which I should have mentioned earlier) are the only objective measures we have right now – by those measures, the front-runners (in polls and fundraising) are generally doing better than those behind them.
I want Biden to drop out, but objectively, there’s no reason for him to do so right now.
I gotta agree with SlackerInc on this one. Starting off as the veep of your party’s most recent President is a huge advantage going in, and I’m sure the degree of that advantage has been objectively measured.
But since my Google-fu is letting me down, take Mondale in 1984, for instance. Would he have been the frontrunner if he’d been just a Senator from Minnesota throughout the Carter years? Of course not! He started off on top because he’d been veep, and had to do a lot less to hold off Gary Hart’s challenge than he would have had to do to build up his support to that level to begin with, if he’d been just another Senator. In fact, if he hadn’t been veep, it would have been a wide-open field, and Mondale might not have been noticed by most voters.
I’ve gotta say, Biden looks like a weak candidate compared with Walter Mondale. Do I need to say more?
But that’s not randomly determined – that’s part of Biden’s campaign. He was a Senator, and then a VP – not due to random chance, but because of various decisions and actions taken by Biden and his team over the years. This is a huge advantage, but it’s not due to random chance or coincidence.
You might well be right – we’ll see. I hope Biden doesn’t win – in fact, I’d prefer every other serious candidate (and even Tulsi Gabbard!) over Biden. But right now, the only thing to go on is the polling and fund-raising… and by those measures, Biden is doing a pretty good job. It’s still incredibly early, though, so this doesn’t mean much. We might find out in a few months that, actually, Biden’s been running a pretty awful campaign (I hope this proves to be the case!). We’ll see.
Maybe so, but what do those decisions and actions have to do with his ability to campaign in 2019-2020?
Delaware’s a damn small state. Winning Delaware doesn’t say much about one’s ability to win nationwide.
I’d be on Medicare now if I wasn’t working; Biden won that Senate seat back when I was a teenager. His ability to become a Senator in 1972, most of a lifetime ago, just doesn’t say much about now.
He’s run for President twice before, and sucked at it.
Who knows what he did to become VP in 2008? But whatever he did, it’s hard to see how that translates into an ability to win votes now.
We’ll see. Hopefully he’s running a shitty campaign and is only doing well in polling and (less so) in fundraising because he was Obama’s VP. We’ll probably know in several months’ time.
While I think Michelle Obama is awesome, she’s made it clear that she has no interest in going into politics. She’s married to a man who made a career of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s her thing.
