June 24 Poll Report

            Good morning everybody.  We have entered the third phase of the campaign.  The first phase, which lasted until May 27, was the "starting positions" phase.  Candidates were announcing their candidacy, some announcing they would NOT be candidates, and, as each one entered, he or she would have a little boomlet of attention, appear on some news shows and some talk shows, and, in almost every case, their numbers would go up a little bit after they formally announced that they were in the race, then back down the phase had passed. 

            The second phase, which began on May 28, was a "sorting out" phase, which was the gradual evaporation of support for many candidates and a consolidation of support for a few.  Elizabeth Warren dominated the consolidation phase among my voters, her support number rising from 1203 on May 27 to 2008 on June 27.   Toward the end of the sorting out phase most of the polls were very quiet, and the largest effects each day were from the removal of the more volatile polls from early in the 50-day window. 

            We have entered a new phase now, the post-debate phase, and yesterday’s vote was a shocker.   Andrew Yang, expected to get 6% based on previous polling, got 15% of the vote, while Joe Biden, expected to get 33%, got only 22%:

            Biden would have been expected to beat Yang 33-6 in the poll; in fact, he beat him only 22-15. 

            This is not a result of last night’s debate; that poll was mostly finished before the voting.  I check on the poll throughout the day; Biden was setting at 22%, Yang around 14-16%, all day.  

            We could interpret this, of course, as an increase in support for Yang, or a slide for Biden combined with a feeling of some voters that they don’t really like Warren and Biden isn’t going to beat her, so they had better find somebody else to vote for.   Yang, I gather, was the subject of a recent profile in Time Magazine; we subscribe to Time, but I haven’t actually seen that article.  Probably that profile is the most likely explanation for his stunning performance.

            I matched Yang against heavy hitters in this poll in part because he did well in two recent polls, but did not get much out of it because he was beating lightweights, so there weren’t that many points on the board.   It’s like a college basketball ranking system; you don’t get that much benefit from beating Prairie View A&M and Slippery Rock.   If you hang in the game against North Carolina, that’s a lot more impressive.  Yang deserved a chance to hang in the game against a heavy hitter, and he did. 

            Whatever caused it, it rocks the standings.  A total of 599 points have changed hands since yesterday, the highest number since April.  The standings were a little immature in April; people were still jumping into the race, and the standings were based on less than 30 polls, so people would move around more rapidly than they do now. 

            A somewhat counter-intuitive result of yesterday’s vote is that Warren, who met expectations, winning the poll with 55%, nonetheless drops by 90 points in today’s standings.   The way the poll works is to ask "How does Warren compare to Joe Biden in this poll?  How does Warren compare to Andrew Yang in this poll?  How does Warren compare to John Hickenlooper in this poll?"   The three "Warren positioning points" are then compared with about 18 other "Warren positioning points" from other polls, each of them weighted equally, and her current position compared to all of the other candidates is re-estimated.  Because Biden and Warren are two of the three leaders, they are pitted against one another very often, so when Biden’s number plunges downward, that causes a re-evaluation of where Warren actually stands.   Biden dropped by 10% as a result of yesterday’s very disappointing result, which causes a 4% drop in Warren’s total as well—but Warren’s score is so high that a 4% drop for her is 90 points, whereas a 10% drop for Biden is 126 points.  Since yesterday:

            Andrew Yang is up 77 points.

            Kirsten Gillibrand is up 24 points as a secondary effect.  

            Stacey Abrams is up 22 points, Bill Weld up 19 points, Donald Trump up 18, Jay Inslee up 16 and Howard Schultz up 10, all as a secondary effect from Andrew Yang moving up 77 points. 

            Julian Castro and Tulsi Gabbard are up 20 points each as a result of the removal from the data of the May 8^th poll.

            John Hickenlooper is down 17 points as a result of his underperformance in yesterday’s poll. 

            Kamala Harris is down 23 points.   

            Pete Buttigieg is down 55 points.

            Elizabeth Warren is down 90 points, and

            Joe Biden is down 126 points.

            But as a percentage, Warren’s lead over Biden was 64% yesterday and is 74% today.

            In the chart below, I highlight in green any candidate who is up 25% in the last 30 days, and in gray any candidate who is down 25% in the last 30 days.  Also a result of yesterday’s shake-up in the polls, numerous candidates have gotten off the gray list, and Joe Biden has dropped off the green list:

            I am confident that this represents the start of a new phase in the campaign, in which the numbers will shift significantly over the next month or so, for two additional reasons:

1)     That we expected anyway that the debates would be a turning point for some candidates, and

2)     The current vote, occurring now, is another shocker, which will rattle the standings probably even more than today’s did. 

Yesterday’s debate. . . a lot of people are saying that Kamala Harris had a great night, which I didn’t really see; maybe I missed something.  I always thought she was a strong candidate.   The group dynamic was hugely different than the previous night.  The group was much more contentious, disputatious, confrontational and unmannerly, and no one really looks good under those conditions.   I thought Michael Bennet was good.  I didn’t really see that Biden had a bad night; in my mind, the negative reviews of Biden are really merely a new recognition of a weakness that has been there all along.  I never believed that he was the front runner to begin with.  It is hard to like anyone when they are behaving like school children.  

Polling weakness will not drive anyone out of the race in the next two months.  What may drive some people out of the race in the next two months is spending too much money.   If you have a 120-person staff in Iowa, then you HAVE to bring in money to keep the machine running.   If your poll numbers are bad, you won’t be able to bring in the money, and you’ll have to drop out.  But just low poll numbers, on their own, won’t really become significant until early next year, because there is a long, long time to catch up.

To me, there is still NO sign that Bernie Sanders is a viable candidate or will have any significant impact on the race. 

Thanks for reading.