The official Daily Kos presidential straw poll results were posted on Wednesday. With more than 60,000 votes tallied, here’s where they’re at, percentage-wise:
Warren 41
Sanders 15
Yang 14
Biden 10
Andrew Yang’s results are obviously out of sync with the sentiments of the site, with his politics and bro-y style better suited for the Reddit scene. He’s not a credible candidate, and he’s treated accordingly around here.
The data-crunchers over at Daily Kos Elections decided it would be fun to see what the results would be if they were limited to just the Daily Kos crowd, absent outside spamming, and we have some results!
Before I get to them, a little background: The straw poll went live at 10 AM PT, 1 PM ET. Emails went out to big segments of our list, asking them to vote, at 2 PM. Then at 4 PM ET, a follow-up email was sent reminding mostly that same universe of people that the poll would be closing soon. Meanwhile, our SMS (phone text) list was pinged at 3 PM ET, also directing them to the poll.
So we have five universes of results here:
The official “everything” results (Daily Kos universe + other online referrers)
Website (people who directly visit the site)
Email list (people who visited following a link from email)
SMS list (people who visited following a link texted to their phones)
Daily Kos users (website + email + SMS)
Here are the results for each of those groups:
|
Warren |
Sanders |
Biden |
Buttigieg |
Harris |
yang |
Official |
41 |
15 |
10 |
7 |
5 |
14 |
Total Daily Kos |
48 |
17 |
11 |
8 |
5 |
<1% |
Website |
65 |
6 |
6 |
6 |
9 |
<1% |
Email List |
41 |
23 |
14 |
8 |
4 |
<1% |
SMS list |
42 |
18 |
15 |
10 |
5 |
<1% |
What this means is that just about all of Yang’s support came from outside the Daily Kos universe, with him getting less than 1% of support internally. That spamming effort took a bite out of most of the real candidates, but Warren especially, since she’d be close to 50% without those efforts.
These results put to rest the idea that Sanders’ supporters are unduly spamming the straw poll from the outside. Perhaps they did so once upon a time, but that’s certainly not the case anymore. In fact, the official results understate his overall support by a couple of points.
The rest of the breakdowns are interesting in their own right. You guys, reading this after directly visiting the site, it’s clear that you—yeah, you—you’re all about Warren. Two-thirds is a seriously strong showing by those who are paying attention the most. No other candidate is even in double digits, though Kamala Harris comes close.
These numbers confirm a trend I had noticed—that the email list was much more Bernie- and Biden-friendly than the site, and it turns out that, yes, they are significantly more so.
As for the SMS and email lists, the big difference is in Bernie’s numbers, and I have no idea what it means. So I won’t even pretend to guess. It could literally be just coincidence.
In any case, I do want to stress that the official results are the official results. There is nothing in the rules against driving traffic to the poll. In fact, it’s a window into which campaigns are generating online activism, and there’s no doubt that Yang has an extremely motivated corps of online warriors.
But when it comes to Yang, that’s all that means, because there’s nothing else of substance worth considering.