Official 2020 US Election: Democratic Party Discussion

[Bofferbrauer2]

Jaicee said:

Okay, we now have a roster of four major post-debate national polls in and here's the average of them:

Biden: 31%
Sanders: 15.8%
Warren: 15.5%
Harris: 8.3%
Buttigieg: 5.5%
Others: 2.5% or less

The bottom line here is that Kamala Harris's poll numbers have now largely reverted back to where they were before the first Democratic debate (she was averaging 7% then) and Biden has regained essentially all ground he lost to her in that debate as a result. It's impossible to tell whether the second debate round had any affect that on that trend because it was already ongoing anyway. Regardless, it's looking like she was just a passing fad at this point.

It also appears that Elizabeth Warren may have benefited from the debate at the margins, catching back up to Bernie Sanders as a result, having been averaging about 2.5 percentage points behind him just before. This is her best polling average to date. Still, she didn't catch up.

That's the only "movement" here. Biden is leading by a margin of 15.2 percentage points, which is almost equivalent to his nearest rival's entire base of support. This contest is clearly set in stone.

I'll wait until the first full week of Morning consult (since they have the largest number of people polled by far, so probably the most realistic nation-wide mean value) to fully judge, but from what I see from their 4-day poll compared to late June is as followed:

Biden lost quite a bit (he was at 38% on June 17-23, while now he's at about 33% Not a huge amount, but it brought him certainly down a peg), Sanders and Warren won a bit (1 and 3% respectively), Harris didn't totally fall back yet (she's still 3% up compared to late June, but down 4% from her height after the first debate), Beto lost a point (down to 3) and Yang is now pretty consistently at 2%, behind Booker's 3%. Pretty much no changes for the other candidates. Bit of a pity for someone like Castro who really did well on both debates but gets drowned out by the mass of better-known candidates.

Jaicee said:

SpokenTruth said:

Poll numbers this early are largely just name recognition and don't have a great record for predicting the final nominee.

Thou DOUBTEST the Janice?! Ye shall learn!!

In seriousness, I love how optimistic some of you are that there's still a realistic chance that someone other than Joe Biden could win the nomination, but I've seen enough of these now to know that you're just simply wrong. For example, people keep repeating the same above line that Biden's only winning at present due to superior name-recognition no matter how late in the race it gets. I imagine somebody may still be trying that argument in December even. The fact is that, in the long run, the polls aren't moving, or at least not much. It doesn't seem to especially matter how much people get to know the other candidates; it's not changing the way they intend to vote, or at least not appreciably.

The details of my prediction that I posted a couple pages ago are debatable and could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that my prediction Joe Biden will win in the end isn't.

I'll have to look to find the article again, can't seem to find it right now. But It's actually very rare that the early frontrunner in the democratic primaries won the primaries - and even rarer that he won the election afterwards. The article I was looking for was going back until the 70's and only twice was the early frontrunner (who wasn't a sitting president running for re-election, of course) also running for presidency later on.

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 08 August 2019