LOL, that didn't take long.

According to Donald Trump, Joe Biden is too old to be President. President Trump regards himself as a young and vibrant man! Democrats will need to put up a younger candidate to compete against the great, young and vibrant President Trump.

A comprehensive overview of the democratic primary contenders

OK, as the field of contenders is forming, I thought I gather all the data available and post it in one post to have it all together. It is probably incomplete, has the wrong methodology and most likely is unfair to your favorite candidate and shows your most hated candidate in a way too good light. Do it better!

I include my sources as links and also link the download of the gnumeric spreadsheet I used to collect the data.

The field

First off, an overview of the field:

This table has all candidates, who are considered by at least one of these six as major: Wikipedia, FiveThirtyEight, CNN, Quartz, New York Times and Rolling Stones. The exception is, I included declined candidates only, if they were named more than just by Wikipedia, otherwise it would've been too many.

Only Wikipedia and 538 have given a definition of major, the others probably are subjective.

Wikipedia-definition of major: In addition to having filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for president in the Democratic Party primary in 2020 and having confirmed this by an official campaign announcement, the major candidates in this table below have either: ( a ) held public office; ( b ) been included in a minimum of five independent national polls; or ( c ) received substantial media coverage.

The 538-definition of major includes all candidates qualifying for the debates by the criteria set by the DNC (either one) and additionally candidates for which at least six out of ten questions can be answered with yes. Look at the article for the questions and more details.

Rollign Stones has a ranking of the candidates. I see no criteria for this ranking, so it is probably subjective. I include this purely for information.

In the above table I marked some candidates with stars. The meaning is:

• Marianne Williamson: Quartz lists her campaign as exploratory, which is outdated.
• Mike Gravel: CNN lists him as undeclared
• John Kerry and Mitch Landrieu: Wikipedia lists them as declined
• Howard Schultz: might run as an Independent

I list the candidates fullfillment of the DNC-criteria for the first debates. The source for this is 538.

I ordered the above list according to following criteria:

1. Status: running, exploring (currently no one), undeclared, withdrawn, declined
2. DNC criteria: fullfiled both, one or none
3. number of media considering the candidate as major
4. alphabetical

Endorsements

So far I only see FiveThirtyEight ranking endorsements. You might dislike their methodology, but they are the only ones I know of making such ranking at all. If you know of more endorsement trackers, please let me know.

Their methodology is basically to pick certain positions (like past presidents, senators, house representatives, DNC chairs) and appoint a point value to their position. For instance a US senator is worth six points and a US representative 3 points. These points are added up. The pool of possible endorsers is limited this way, overall 2,256 points are up for grabs. So far 14.6% of the points are gained by one candidate or the other. I lists the points and the percentages of the overall pool in this graphic.

Michael Bloomberg declined to run, after he got the endorsement.

Look at the source, to see the endorsers in detail.

Fundraising

Wikipedia has a fundraising table with the FEC-data filed for the quarter ending March 31st. This is the Wikipedia-table sorted by fundraising total.

You should note with this data, that some candidates transferred money from former campaigns or are strongly self-funded (Delaney).

I have transformed the data into a graph of the fundraising total and the percentage of small dollar donations.

Note that Richard Ojeda dropped out of the race.

Social Media

Quartz was nice enough to collect data about social media followers of the candidates profiles.

One note here for Jay Inslee: Quartz counted the followers for his personal Facebook page (125,000) and his page as gouvernor (110,000). I added both for the above chart.

Cable news coverage

FiveThirtyEight tracks coverage of the candidates in cable news. They do regularly articles about that. The linked one is the last. I show their very informative graphic here, but follow the link to the article for more information.

Polls

Well, polls are obviously among the most important data. As there are a lot of pollsters it is quite difficult to get an overview. I found in the web only RealClearPolitics creating an average (follow the link for a view of developments over time). So I took myself recent polls from the 538-database of polls and created an weighted average myself (more explanations after the graph).

Not included directly in the graph (but indirectly, because both RCP average and my weighted average include it) is Morning Consult. Their overview is also quite informative.

The following graph has the weighted average I made and the RCP average:

So how did I do the weighted average? I picked from the list of national polls the ones conducted in April. If a pollster took multiple polls I only included the most recent. Change Research and Monmouth University both asked with Biden included and excluded. As Biden declared since, I picked the poll with Biden.

Following that criteria, I picked 7 polls from Ipsos, Morning Consult, Change Research, Monmouth University, USC Dornsife/LA Times, Emerson College and HarrisX. 538 has a pollster ranking, I weighted the poll based on that ranking with D- as 0.5 and A+ as 1.6 and everything in between a 0.1 step apart. With this weights I made an weighted average.

What else?

I would like to include data about the ground game, so the number of paid staff and the number of volunteers. But I can't find something reliable over the majority of the field, so this is missing.

If you find errors or have additions, please feel free to inform me.

Great work, Mnementh!

I wonder why there is so much coverage for Swalwell but almost none for Gabbard

Well, as Tulsi Gabbard mostly gets hit pieces on cable news, this probably is for the best.

Anyways, I did not draw any conclusion from all the data I collected. Maybe I can see some points in there.

1. I personally think the qualification for the debates will be the first breaking point. With such a field it will be incredibly hard to survive without the exposure the debates grant. So I think the first contenders will fold after the DNC announces the debate participants (or shortly before, as the campaign already knows if they qualify). So far 16 qualify according to 538, and apparently Marianne Williamson is only 8100 unique donors away from qualification.
2. Stacey Abrams looks pretty strong compared to some people who are actually running. She is considered major from most media and therefore probably will get media coverage, has better social media reach than many competitors and does surprisingly well in the polls for someone not running. She outpolls Jay Inslee, Eric Swalwell, John Delaney, Mike Gravel and Marianne Williamson. But as said in point 1, the debates will be important, so she should decide soon.
3. Even though Bernie Sanders raised the most money, he also has the biggest share of small dollar donors. Over 80%. Speaking of small dollar donors, most candidates seen usually as progressive (Warren, Yang, Williamson, Gabbard, Ojeda) are clearly above 50% in this regard, only joined by two more moderate/conservative candidates in O'Rourke and Buttigieg. But the other candidates are all have lower shares, most in the 30% area like Harris, Klobuchar, Inslee, Castro. Some are notably even lower, like Delaney (self-funded) or Gillibrand and Booker. I don't know how much is because of money taken over from earlier campaigns.
4. Sanders and Warren both have great reach on social media, but both do poorly in endorsements of main party figures and legislators. Go figure.
5. Fox news does cover Sanders more than liberal media. That's not only the recent outbreak after the town hall, which pretty much made the Fox coverage explode. But even before Fox coverage of Sanders was bigger than the other two. I wonder if mostly negative, this story is not told by the numbers.
6. Buttigieg stole Betos thunder!
7. Andrew Yang has - on a small scale - recently seen a rise in media coverage and polls. He is in the very exclusive club (only six) of candidates who match both DNC criteria for the debates. If that goes on, he may have a breakout from the 1%-club. Or not. Not sure how that will develop, but it is something to watch.
8. It may be me alone, but Castro, Gillibrand and Delaney look like their campaign goes rather weak. They may really need to impress in these debates.
9. The endorsements clearly show that Biden, Booker, Harris and Klobuchar are the dream-candidates of the establishment.

1. I said it before, it looks like we could end up with 20 persons in the debates.

3. That was to be expected, really

4. Well, the DCCC had made rules against this moderate uprising, so I guess the establishment just doesn't want to support them. Also, I don't consider it really meaningful at this point - just look how far Sanders went last time with basically zero support for these guys.

5. Knowing Fox News, they probably try to spin things negatively. But seeing how Bernie (and his supporters) react to them, it just looks like Fox is setting themselves up for backfires.

6. That was pretty much clear past the beginning of the month.

7. I get tons of news about him on my google News feed on my phone. So yeah, it looks like he's rising right now, probably because his $1000 a month paycheck for everybody sounds so foreign to them, and want to understand it themselves.

8. I think, that's pretty much the consensus here, you're definitely not alone on that one.

9. See number 4. I don't think that that's really meaningful right now.

I'm sorry, the love for Gabbard in this forum is just creepy. She schmoozes with dictators, and you can try to justify it because she denounced extremist Islam, but at the end of the day she's praising him. It reminds me of how we cozied up with Stalin back in WWII. That ended well didn't it? Stalin helped us beat Hitler, sure, but then we got the cold war. Sanders has pointed out the growing ring of right-wing authoritarian leaders that all work together, and how we need to stand up to them with a progressive alliance, but everyone in this thread refuses to listen to that and instead worships Gabbard as she boosts the authoritarians with legitimacy and recognition. It makes me sick.

1. Unsure, some of the remaining people seem like hard sells. On the other hand 16 already qualify and Williamson is close, so not much open spots left. And we still have a month or so.

9. Oh, I don't say this has any meaning in the result. I only say it clearly indicates establishment preferences, as the pool 538 defined is clearly party establishment: democratic lawmakers, holders of offices and DNC members.

Well, you're not alone in this, many dislike her. You can decide at the polling booth in the primaries, if she makes it that far. No need to be in panic, she polls not well and there are plenty of other fish in the sea.

True. And of course, let me be clear, while I strongly dislike her, and don't understand the forum's fascination with her, I don't dislike anyone here. You're all a good bunch. And I liked her too at one point. Wanted her as VP and everything. Things have just come to light that make me massively distrust her on foreign policy. I actually like where she stands on the vast majority of domestic policy. Though I slightly distrust her on LGBT rights, as I did with Clinton.