Remember me
Forgot your username/password?
 
Print
Home>Articles

July 16 Poll Report

By Bill James
July 16, 2019
 

July 16 Poll Report

 

            Good morning everybody.   There was an un-intended pun in yesterday’s polling matchups, in that we had both Moulton and Weld in the group; of course, in Welding you use Molten metal. . . .they call it molten lead, although, like the lead in a pencil, it isn’t actually lead; that’s just what they call it.

            Not too much happened in yesterday’s poll; the prediction was 94% accurate, which means, of course, that the outcome of the vote was 94% consistent with previous polling.  The only thing that happened was that Joe Biden lost one point to Weld, one point to Molten, and one point to de Blasio.  Although he still won the group by 48 points:

Scores

Weld

237

Moulton

89

de Blasio

103

Biden

944

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Predicted

Weld

17

Moulton

6

de Blasio

8

Biden

69

Actual

Weld

18

Moulton

7

de Blasio

9

Biden

66

 

            The only meaningful changes in the Support Scores since yesterday are that Elizabeth Warren is up 54 points and Joe Biden is down 26 points; otherwise just small adjustments.  Warren is up as a result of the removal of the May 26th poll from the relevant data; she will move up again on Thursday, when we remove the May 28th polling data from the group.   She had not reached her peak by late May; her surge ended in early June, but she was still moving upward in late May, so that data is still holding her back a little bit.  On May 26th she beat Joe Biden in the poll, 53-39.  She would beat him now by a significantly wider margin than that. 

            Biden was also in the May 26th poll (you just said that), so he was a double-dipper yesterday, in both the day’s poll and the one being cut out of the data.   His 26-point decline is explained more by the removal of the May 26th poll than by yesterday’s vote, although he also did under-perform a little in yesterday’s poll.  To be honest, I am surprised by how slowly Biden is declining.   His Support Score has declined by 23% in the last 30 days.  If you had asked me 30 days ago, I would have guessed that he would decline more rapidly than that.  What I now realize is that Biden’s support isn’t ALL just name recognition; it is a combination of name recognition and the desire for a centrist Democrat.   I don’t think that anybody who has seen him on TV recently actually thinks that he is up to the job; it’s just the lack of a good alternative in the center. 

            These are the updated Support Scores:

Rank

First

Last

Support

1

Elizabeth

Warren

1863

2

Pete

Buttigieg

1001

3

Joe

Biden

918

4

Kamala

Harris

804

5

Donald

Trump

580

6

Amy

Klobuchar

479

7

Julian

Castro

448

8

Andrew

Yang

412

9

Bernie

Sanders

398

10

Beto

O'Rourke

318

11

Cory

Booker

316

12

Jay

Inslee

300

13

Kirsten

Gillibrand

261

14

John

Hickenlooper

261

15

Bill

Weld

236

16

Tulsi

Gabbard

236

17

Michael

Bennet

170

18

Howard

Schultz

166

19

John

Delaney

131

20

Tim

Ryan

119

21

Bill

de Blasio

104

22

Steve

Bullock

104

23

Marianne

Williamson

91

24

Seth

Moulton

85

25

Mike

Gravel

80

 

            I should alert you that I will be traveling beginning next week, and I may not be able to do daily updates every day.  I’ll try to do them, but there will be some days when I don’t get them done.   Thanks for reading.

 

 
 

COMMENTS (9 Comments, most recent shown first)

chrisbodig
Biden would beat Trump if the election were held in the next few months. However, he's not a strong candidate, he's not inspiring passion from the base and I think the Democratic primary process may weaken his ability to beat Trump in November 2018.

As flawed as the traditional polls are in sorting out a field of 24 candidates, the head to head matchups between people that both have universal name recognition provide a better snapshot in time.

In the 19 polls conducted in 2019, Biden beats Trump outside the margin of error in every one (including by an average of 7.5 points in the two polls taken in July).

Trump beats Warren in 4 out of the 16 polls taken in 2019 (with one tie).

Could she beat Trump next November? Probably but (sad but true) there are still people who are not ready for a female president. I met one last week in Ohio. She's a 48 year-old divorced mom, dating my Yale roommate who is a college professor.

Is it possible that there were 77,000 people in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania who voted for Trump over Clinton in 2016 because he was a man and she was a woman? Don't know, but certainly possible. Sad if true.
2:05 PM Jul 17th
 
CharlesSaeger
@shthat: that’s my biggest issue with them and possibly Warren. And I’m on a recurring monthly donation to the Sanders campaign. For a party appealing to youth, the Democrats have a geezer-heavy slate of candidates. And the most likely candidate not eligible for Social Security, Kamala Harris, still doesn’t have an issues page on her website.
7:39 AM Jul 17th
 
CharlesSaeger
len: that isn’t much of a sample. None of the Democrats I know think Biden can beat Trump, but yet the polling shows otherwise. All think Warren could beat him; most think Sanders could.

Much like Bill’s Twitter followers, our friend circles aren’t representative of America as a whole. They’re mostly representative of folks who think like us.
7:23 AM Jul 17th
 
shthar
I can't get too excited about biden or sanders.

Odds are one of them is going to be dead by elecection day.


2:00 AM Jul 17th
 
len
Often when I read Bill’s comments I wonder if one of his goals is to see how much he can influence the polls against Biden and towards Warren. I still believe that the primary goal for most Democrats is to beat Trump and none of the Democrats I talk to feel Warren can beat Trump.
12:30 AM Jul 17th
 
chrisbodig
MarisFan61, please don't tease me that way. Kasich was my #1 choice in 2016 and I was a big Romney supporter in 2012 (big enough that Trump and the RNC call me relentlessly thinking that I'll give money to him too).

I tease those RNC/Trump telemarketers sometimes. I tell them that I will be happy to donate to the President's campaign when he releases all of his tax returns and stops rage Tweeting. Of course, the odds of that are the same as Mario Mendoza making it into the Hall of Fame.

11:33 PM Jul 16th
 
MarisFan61
Not that I think I have any feel for Booker's chances, because I had thought he would have soared after his debate and he sure hasn't, but....
I don't see that he's been (as Bill put it yesterday) "examined and rejected by the public," nor that (as Chris says) he's done. I think it's more like he hasn't been examined. I think he's a wild card.

Re what Chris said about the Republicans: Don't forget Kasich. He's been lurking -- quite well, I think. Unlikely though it may be, if Trump gets successfully put in the trash heap, Kasich could well be the one who fills the void. I think he and Romney would be the main possibilities in such an event. In fact, that wouldn't be a bad ticket.​
11:21 PM Jul 16th
 
CharlesSaeger
There's no reason to think Sanders is done. He has a strong following and strong fundraising with a model that helps to turn out voters. (My home state, Minnesota, has a history of Republicans using a similar fund-raising model. The principle is once you give money, you're more likely to turn out to the polls.) He also rules an ideological niche that's largely unrepresented in your followers, with some overlap with Warren. Theirs will be an interesting battle. Sanders's weakness is a strong reliance on younger voters, who are notoriously hard to turn out since they don't have a history of voting.

Instead, Buttigieg is done. He has lost ground in the general polls (which are likely more accurate than this game) and hasn't picked up black voters, who are crucial in the early states (which is what doomed Sanders in 2016, though he wasn't playing to win that year; another reason to think Sanders isn't done is he's picked up strength in this category). Buttigieg also heavily represents the professional class that's likely heavily overrepresented in your poll—a class that is now trending towards Warren. Buttigieg is also few voters' second choice, in spite of having decent name recognition now.

I don't think well of Biden or his chances, but again I suspect the polled class is whiter than the Democratic Party, which artificially suppresses Biden. At the moment, he's safe; I don't think other candidates near him ideologically will go anywhere (Booker will do better than Bill thinks, but he won't go far; Klobuchar is boredom personified and will have no appeal beyond the wonk class; Castro is a momentary flash in the pan; O'Rourke is a lightweight with waning interest). Biden is a big distraction to Kamala Harris, as Biden sucks up donations (the big deal at the moment) that likely would go to her. (I think his donors hate Warren and know they hate Sanders, though Sanders isn't asking for their money.) I think he's the candidate Trump would most like to face; his grip on black voters is tenuous, while Trump beats him in Biden's other area of backers, older voters. If black voters defect from Biden (which I think they will), he's done; where they go if that happens is a very good question.

Gillibrand may be a surprise. She's a Senator of a big state, which guarantees some extra coverage. She's made some enemies (the Clintons, and the DNC after the Franken mess), but they might be the right kind of enemies, the ones who add credibility to you. She's adept on shifting politically, having moved leftward as a Senator once she stopped representing an upstate district.

And I'll say it: there's absolutely no chance that Bill Weld will be the Republican nominee. Trump is very popular among Republicans, having over 80% approval. In the unlikely event of his departure, I'd gather either Mike Pence (representing the evangelicals) or Tom Cotton (representing the hard right) will be the nominee. Maybe Ted Cruz; nobody likes him, but he's a clever weasel and has solid right-wing credentials. Weld will excite the Republican base even less than did Mitt Romney, and won't have the solid backing of the party leadership that Romney had. He represents a voting bloc of moderate Republicans that's now only a few thousand voters, the small size of which is one reason I think cross-aisle outreach is an idiotic priority. Base turnout is the name of the game nowadays. The Republicans get that much better than the Democrats, and Trump turns out their base.
10:35 PM Jul 16th
 
chrisbodig
Hi Bill, agree completely with what you said about Joe Biden. His appeal is both name recognition and the lack of an alternative in the center (or left-center). It's also true that he is a weak candidate. But I do think he is the front-runner regardless.

If being the front-runner means "who would win if everyone voted tomorrow," he's the front-runner. All the traditional "old fogey" polls can't all be wrong about that. However, those polls are just snapshots in time. As we've already seen with the Warren surge, the BJOL polls predict trends before they're manifested in the other polls.

I think that, just as the BJOL polls don't fully measure Donald Trump's support, it's apparent that they probably don't fully measure Biden's support. As you've noted, people opt-in to these polls as opposed to being called out of the blue. A good portion of the Biden voters (as measured by the old fogey polls) are probably from folks who just haven't given it a lot of thought. He's the name they know.

In the old fogey polls, Biden's lead is the smallest in the Economist/YouGov poll, which is coincidentally an "opt-in" internet poll. He's been up by 4 points in the last two of these polls, compared to an average 12-point lead in the phone polls.

There's also this: the old fogey polls are consistent in their cross-tabs. Biden gets a lot of his support from African-Americans and with voters making less than $50,000. Without the support from those two constituencies, he would not be in the lead. The first part (the black vote) is one of the reasons that his leads in New Hampshire and Iowa are smaller than his lead nationwide (not a lot of African-Americans in NH or IA).

Is it possible that the Twitter followers of BJOL are underrepresented in these two constituencies? All of us who follow baseball know that their are vastly fewer African-American players in today's game than there were decades ago. If you go to baseball games in person, you also see a dearth of black faces. It would make sense that the Democratic-leaning voters in the BJOL polls might not have the same level of African-American representation as the Democratic party as a whole.

I'm not as sure about the income part but it wouldn't be surprising if the BJOL followers were more affluent than the country as a whole. In the old fogey cross tabs, Warren and Buttigieg do best among voters with higher incomes. That matches what we see in the BJOL polls.

If being the front-runner is "who is most likely to eventually win" I would say that there is no true front-runner right now but a Warren-Harris duel for the nomination is more likely than a Biden romp. Also agree with what you wrote yesterday: Bernie's done. Beto's done. Booker's done.

What happens going forward will be fascinating. We're still in the first inning of this game.


1:27 PM Jul 16th
 
 
©2024 Be Jolly, Inc. All Rights Reserved.|Powered by Sports Info Solutions|Terms & Conditions|Privacy Policy