A new Washington Post-ABC News poll (which fivethirtyeight.com rates as A+) released today has good news for those who are worried about the strength of our field of Democratic candidates for President:
President Donald Trump loses in a hypothetical matchup with all of the leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, according to the results of a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Tuesday.
Trump – with a job approval rating twenty percentage points lower than his disapproval rating of 58% – trailed by sizable margins against former Vice President Joe Biden (56%-39%); Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts (54%-39%); Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont (56%-39%), South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (52%-41%) and Sen. Kamala Harris of California (52%-41%).
Each of those Democratic candidates also performed well against Trump in a Sept. 5 Post-ABC poll, but all of them expanded those leads in this week's survey….
The poll was conducted from Oct. 27-30 using a random sample of 1,003 adults and with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5%.
Even though this is a national poll, someone who wins only 39%-41% of the national electorate is not going to win the electoral college. We shouldn’t be complacent, of course, as a lot can happen between now and the general election, and this is just one poll. But we should also not be panicking, and we should not be favoring one candidate over another due to polls that have one getting a few percentage points more than another against Trump, given that Trump does almost equally badly against all of them. The lesser known Democratic candidates just have more voters choosing “undecided” because they haven’t heard of them yet, but the bottom line is that Trump does almost equally badly against any of our 5 frontrunners. We also have to remember that polls do not measure how likely a candidate is to excite Democratic leaners who would otherwise not vote to turn out to vote. It’s much easier to respond to a phone or internet poll than to actually go through the process of registering to vote and then voting, so phone and internet polls are a poor measure of voter excitement (and even asking respondents how excited they are, or whether they intend to vote, is a poor predictor of what voters will actually do, because most infrequent voters can’t predict their own behavior, and most polls don’t even count eligible voters who haven’t yet registered to vote). So let’s focus on getting more Democratic leaners registered to vote, and trying to choose a Democratic nominee for President, and nominees for all the races downballot, who are the most likely to excite more of the almost half of the Democratic-leaning electorate who didn’t vote in 2016, and get them to vote. Downballot elections are going to be at least as important as the Presidential election, given how difficult it is going to be to get a Democratic majority in the Senate, how many of the liberal Supreme Court justices are in their seventies or eighties, and how Democratic control of state governments will be critical to reduce Republican gerrymandering and cheating in the redistricting that will be done after the 2020 census.