July 5 Poll Report

            Good morning everybody.   How was your holiday? 

            I don’t know if you have observed this on your own, but there is a kind of weekly cycle to the list of candidates being polled, in which we start on Thursday at the top of the list, with the strongest candidates, and work down toward the weakest candidates.  There being 28 people currently on the list of those being polled, granted that I need to drop a couple of them, but there are 28 at the moment, so it takes seven days to reach the bottom of the list. 

            When the weakest candidates are polled that has little impact on the standings.  When the strongest candidates are polled, that has more impact.  Yesterday we started at the top of the list, with a poll involving the sitting President and the person most preferred by my voters for the Democratic nomination, Elizabeth Warren.  The consequence of moving back to the top of the list was that 383 points have changed hands since yesterday, which is the highest total in the last seven days. 

            Yesterday’s poll. . .here is a chart summary of yesterday’s poll:

            Trump overperformed expectations, at the cost of all three Democratic opponents.   There are two reasons for this.  One is that Trump’s support is relatively inflexible, compared to the other candidates.  You’re either going to vote for Donald Trump or you are not; it doesn’t really matter who else is in the poll—which is different than the other people being polled.  When Trump is polled against stronger candidates, this makes him look stronger; when he is polled against weaker candidates, it makes him look weaker. 

            I over-stated that; Trump’s support, the last six times he has been polled, has been as low as 19%, also 21% and 22%, as high as 29%, so there actually is some flexibility in the Trump support vis a vis different opponents.  The other reason Trump did better is that a reader has been re-tweeting the polls to a more conservative audience, which I appreciate his doing because I know that my polls have been giving unrealistically low support estimates for the President.  

            As a result of these things, Trump’s evaluation jumped by 75 points yesterday, which is three-quarters of one percent.   Elizabeth Warren’s number fell by 62 points.  I am quite confident that this does NOT represent a meaningful decline in Warren’s support; actually I expect her to recover most or all of those 66 points in secondary adjustments over the next couple of weeks.  

            However, it is now more clear—as I speculated two days ago in this space—that Elizabeth’s Warren’s support has plateaued.  On April 28^th, her score was 718.  From then until June 26^th, she was crushing it.  She was gaining strength versus her opponents, in this poll, almost every day, poll after poll, adjustment after adjustment.   She no longer is.  She isn’t losing the support she has gained, but the people picking up support now are Kamala Harris, Andrew Yang and Julian Castro; perhaps to a small degree Marianne Williamson is still picking up supporters.  The first round of debates were a turning point in the campaign, as anyone would have expected they would be.

            They were also a turning point for Kirsten Gillibrand, who (in the debate) jabbered endlessly about her support for reproductive rights, as if the entire field of Democratic candidates did not fully support reproductive rights.  Unfortunately the debates were not a turning point for Beto O’Rourke, who has been falling since April 23^rd until the present.  On April 23^rd he was at 682, pretty much on the same level as Elizabeth Warren.   He has been in a slump ever since, and his Support Score now is less than one-half that. 

            The relatively large changes yesterday for Trump and Warren cause a re-evaluation of all the previous polls in light of the new information; we call this "secondary effects".  Since yesterday:

            Donald Trump is up 75 points as a result of yesterday’s poll.

            John Hickenlooper is up 22 points as a result of the removal of the May 15^th poll from the data; for some reason Hickenlooper just did terrible in the May 15^th poll.

            Stacey Abrams is up 17 points as a secondary effect.  Abrams, who is not a declared candidate and who has been sinking like a stone in the standings, is also performing surprisingly well in the poll which is currently running.  She is off the gray list for now, and if she does as well in today’s poll as she is so far, she’ll stay off of it for a while. 

            Julian Castro is up 14 points, Jay Inslee is up 12 points and Amy Klobuchar is up 10 points due to secondary adjustments.  Ten points is just one-tenth of one percent.

            Joe Biden is down 17 points as a secondary adjustment.

            Cory Booker is down 31 points as a result of the removal of the May 15^th poll from the data considered relevant.

            Kirsten Gillibrand is down 33 points as a result of yesterday’s poll, and

            Elizabeth Warren is down 62 points as a result of yesterday’s poll. 

            On the chart below, candidates who are up 25% in the last 30 days are highlighted in green, while those who are down 25% are shaded in gray.  Tim Ryan and Stacey Abrams have gotten off the gray list—permanently off, in Ryan’s case.  Ryan, who had Support Scores over 200 until early May, for some reason lost more than half of his support in the first half of May, during Warren’s surge.  About half of those who had been supporting Ryan left him and joined the Warren Wagon; he was more hurt by it than anyone else was.   His Support Score dropped to 84 (8/10ths of one percent) on June 21.  Since then he has been slowly recovering, although it seems tremendously unlikely that he will be able to become a serious contender from where he is. 

            These are the current standings:

            Thanks for reading, and for voting.