OK, sorry. That title is a bait-and-switch. I wanted to get both Sanders and Warren fans reading this diary.
So here’s the new poll numbers from YouGov:
Candidate |
New poll:
% support (likely voters):
|
Economist Average |
Biden |
24 |
27.7 |
Warren |
24 |
19.0 |
Sanders |
17 |
15.4 |
Harris |
6 |
7.4 |
Buttigieg |
5 |
5.2
|
Yang |
2 |
2.9 |
Booker |
2 |
2.6 |
Castro |
2 |
0.7 |
Gabbard |
1 |
1.5 |
O'Rourke |
1 |
1.8 |
As I said, both Warren and Sanders came out above their current polling average. But of course, the impressive thing here is that Warren is apparently tied with Biden!
But you should never pay too much attention to any one poll. They inevitably fluctuate due merely to random sampling error, as well as other sources of error that may be less random. The important thing is the polling average. The Economist’s average, shown above in the third column, weights “all high-quality polls” for sample size and recency. That means, among other things, that robocall polls are not part of this average, so it ends up different from the better-known but methodologically-weaker RCP average.
…
So what did I mean by asking “Is it Bernie’s time?” in the title? I meant that
I think it’s time to be thinking about whether Bernie should drop out.
I realize this may sound like a non-sequitur. He’s polling in 3rd place; shouldn’t we be talking about whether the candidates at the bottom should drop out, first?
My argument has 3 parts:
- Warren and Sanders are getting in each others’ way. While each has a few strengths that the other doesn’t, in terms of both policy and demographic appeal, the fact is that they overlap more than any other pair of candidates. And in our current stupid voting method, that spells trouble for both of them.
- Of the two, it’s clear that Warren has a better chance to win the nomination. In fact, I’d argue that Sanders’s chances are growing very slim.
- The candidates below 3rd place have so little support that it barely matters if they drop out. In this latest poll, the combined support for all candidates between 1% and 15% support added up to just 19%; barely more than Sanders alone. And the supporters of those minor candidates generally already realize that their favorite candidate is not a frontrunner, and still support them; so if their candidate dropped out, a substantial portion of those voters would not immediately switch to one of the frontrunners.
Let me go over those arguments in a bit more detail.
Warren and Sanders are getting in each others’ way.
In a decent voting method such as approval voting, voters can support more than one candidate without diluting their voting power. That’s how it should be; you don’t have to love dogs any less just because you also love cats.
But we use choose-one voting instead. The more similar two candidates are, the more they get in each others’ way. That’s stupid, but it’s how we do it.
And yes, Warren and Sanders are similar candidates. They differ in various ways (Sanders calls his reform program “socialist” while Warren calls hers “capitalist”; Warren focuses less on health care; they have different genders, ages, and histories of political activism; Sanders appeals more to younger and less-educated voters while Warren’s appeal is more balanced in age but skewed in education; etc.) but all-in-all, their policy plans and ideological appeal is very similar.
I think that, if we can’t fix the voting method, it’s worthwhile for supporters of either to consider whether it’s time to switch, to unite. So the questions are: which is better, and which is more likely to win the nomination?
I think Warren is better. I think that she’s shown excellent judgement in building a campaign team, and in laying out solid, substantive plans for if she wins. I could go into more specifics, but I don’t think all my opinions on that would fit in this diary. And most importantly, they are just opinions; I can back them up with arguments, but not with clear, hard facts.
With the other question, it’s different. Of the two, I think that Warren has a better chance to win the nomination, and I think the facts show that clearly.
First off, of course, there’s the aforementioned polling average:
You can clearly see that Warren has been steadily rising, while Sanders has been even or slightly fading. At this point, the confidence bands on their polling averages barely overlap. (I’m finishing my PhD dissertation in statistics, so I know what I’m talking about when I say that such a slight overlap in two separate 90% confidence bands probably indicates less than 10% chance that the true values are in the opposite order.)
But the difference in strength is shown even more clearly if you look beyond those choose-one numbers to polling questions where voters can show support for more than one candidate. For instance, see the graph on the right showing how many voters are “considering” each candidate. And unfavorability is even worse for Sanders; in the latest poll, he has 23% “unfavorable”/“very unfavorable” among Democrats with only 9% no-opinions, while Warren has 12% with 16% no-opinions. Note that the “no opinion” reflects Warren’s slightly lower name recognition and thus slightly better room for growth.
I also think that, against both Biden in the primary and Trump in the general, Warren will ultimately be a stronger candidate. As a woman who isn’t as old as either of them, she will be able to take advantage of their weaknesses on those fronts; Sanders won’t. (I do recognize that Sanders currently runs slightly stronger than Warren does in general election polls against Trump, but I think that this early in the race those polls reflect nothing more than name recognition.)
The candidates below 3rd place have so little support that it barely matters if they drop out.
It makes no sense to pick a fight with the Harris and Buttigieg supporters, telling them their candidate shouldn’t be in the race. Not only to those candidates represent important Democratic constituencies who deserve a voice; not only have their supporters almost certainly already considered and passed over the frontrunners for now; but the effect of their dropouts would just be too minor, given their current numbers, to worry about. Given that fact, I think that candidates like Kamala, Pete, Andrew, Cory, and Julian are all bringing more into the race currently than they’re taking away. (As for the ones even below that… who cares?)
Conclusion
I realize that I’m starting a pie fight here. Any DKos diary suggesting that some candidate should drop out is going to make some people here see red. Even though I’ve tried to lay out my arguments calmly and factually, there will be people who disagree, and some of them will probably be more than vehement. Those aren’t the people this diary is intended for.
My hope is that, for the substantial number of people here who, like me, agree with the platforms of both Sanders and Warren, but unlike me, are still on the fence… that I can convince some of you to strategically join the Warren bandwagon. I HATE that we use a voting method where that kind of strategic choice is necessary, and a lot of my writing here and elsewhere is devoted to reforming that problem. But for now, that’s the world we live in, and I think that it’s worth taking it into consideration.