July 8 Poll Report

            Good morning everybody.  Well, it’s not a good morning for Cory Booker; it may be a good morning for the rest of us.  It finally feels like the 4^th of July is over and I can get back to work.   

            The June 14^th poll report was tagged online as "Cory Booker’s Bad, Horrible Day".   Well, he has had another one—this one worse than the other one.  Yesterday’s poll contestants were John Hickenlooper, Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard and Kamala Harris.  Harris won the vote, as anyone would have expected that she would, and she over-achieved versus previous polling, as we would have expected that she would, as she is riding a little bit of an attention boomlet following her slash-and-grab attack on Joe Biden in the June 28 debate.

            Nonetheless, that was not the essential message of yesterday’s poll.  What happened in yesterday’s poll was (1) Cory Booker finished below John Hickenlooper and Tulsi Gabbard, and (2) Tulsi Gabbard outperformed expectations, relative to her base, much more than Kamala Harris did.  

            It is truly a shocking poll.  In the June 13 poll, Booker had a projected percentage of 10%, actually got 5%; that led to the June 14 tag line of "Cory Booker’s Bad, Horrible Day."   But subsequent to that, Booker did very well in two polls, getting 56% on June 26 against Weld, Swalwell and Hickenlooper, and getting 57% on June 30 against Ryan, Gillibrand and Moulton.  On June 26, he beat John Hickenlooper head to head 56 to 18.  Yesterday, he LOST to John Hickenlooper, 13 to 12.  Let that sink in on you.   He lost to John Hickenlooper. 

            We could conclude that he just doesn’t do well when he is polled against Kamala Harris, but Kamala Harris was not in the June 13^th poll, in which he also stunk.  The headliner in that poll was Elizabeth Warren. 

            We don’t react to yesterday’s poll by moving Jay Hickenlooper ahead of Cory Booker.  That’s not the way the system works.   It’s like if Clemson loses a football game, to, let us say, the University of Missouri.   It is shocking, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that Missouri has a better football team now than Clemson.  It’s just one game.   This is just one poll; we’ll poll Booker again next week.   But it is not a good sign. 

            This is the summary of yesterday’s poll:

            The candidates listed yesterday control an estimated 16.5% of the total vote. 

            For some reason, there were essentially no secondary effects to this vote; I don’t quite know why.  That’s just the way the math worked.  So only four candidates are up or down more than a couple of points since yesterday:

            Tulsi Gabbard is up 26 points as a result of yesterday’s poll.   She beat expectations by 55%.   This lifts Gabbard’s Support Score to 206, which ties her high point during the race; she was also at 206 on May 29.  Since then, however, she has been as low as 157, so her recovery almost puts her on the Green List, the list of candidates who are up 25% in the last 30 days.  Actually, there are several Democratic candidates who are almost on that list, so maybe I shouldn’t make too much of that. 

            Kamala Harris is up 19 points as a result of yesterday’s poll.

            Jay Inslee is up 6 points as a result of the removal from the calculations of the poll of May 18^th.  This increase is enough to put Inslee on the Green List. 

            Cory Booker is down 48 points—half of one percent—as a result of yesterday’s poll.   It would appear that we are near the point at which the analysts are going to have to stop talking about how poorly Beto O’Rourke is doing in the polls, and start talking about how badly Cory Booker is doing. 

            These are the updated Support Scores:

            Tim Ryan has also climbed onto the Green List since yesterday—Inslee and Ryan.  A few words about the Green List:

            Julian Castro is up 77% in the last 30 days, which makes him the fastest-gaining candidate in the field, by far.

            Donald Trump is up 47%, because my polls are being re-tweeted to a more conservative audience, which is helpful to me; I don’t WANT a left-leaning poll.  It isn’t an actual gain for Trump; it’s just a little more realistic polling.

            Andrew Yang is up 46%.

            Tim Ryan is up 34%.   Ryan was also in the May 18^th poll, eliminated from the data as no longer relevant.  This boosts his Support Score by only 3 points, from 100 to 103, but 103 is the highest he has been since June 4, and this is enough to get him on the Green List.   Ryan, who Support Score was over 200 in early May, went through a long decline phase, over a month, which saw his number drop all the way down 80 on June 26, the day before the first Democratic debate.  Since then he has been recovering slowly, and is now growing enough to be coded green, at least for the moment.

            Jay Inslee is up 32% in the last 30 days, and Marianne Williamson is still up 29% as the result of a long series of small gains that she had between May 12, when she had a Support Score of 31, and June 12, when she reached 69.  Thanks for reading.