June 29 Poll Report

            Good morning everybody.   The proposition that the Democratic debate represents a turning point in the long road to the nomination is intuitively obvious, but if we needed confirmation we have it now.   Yesterday’s poll did not go at all as predicted by the previous polls—not for anybody.   These were the standings for the four poll candidates as of yesterday:

            Which would lead to a prediction that Pete Buttigieg would win the poll with 43% of the vote.   That is not at all what happened:

            Kamala Harris, riding off of what was perceived as a strong debate performance, drew 46% of the vote against an expected 30%.  

            A very odd thing about yesterday’s poll is that it had essentially NO secondary effects, no effect on the standing of anyone who was not polled.   I don’t know why that happened; it’s just the way the math worked out, everybody came out in the same place they were yesterday except the people who were actually polled, even though the poll was way out of line with expectations. 

            Also, the stale poll removed from the data, the voting of May 9^th. . . that also was a non-event.   Removing that poll (Trump, Kasich, Bennet and Gravel) from the data, on its own, had basically zero impact.   So we can summarize our comments this morning with reference to just the four from the poll yesterday:

            Kamala Harris is up 58 points—half a percent—since yesterday.   As those of you who read these poll reports will know, Kamala has been languishing in fourth place and getting further behind the top three for the last month, but I always felt and frequently said that it didn’t mean anything in her case.  It’s early in the race; she has formidable skills, a baseline of support and an office from which to operate.  Sitting in fourth place is not actually a bad place for her; let the leaders take the heat.  If she was at 400 and dropping, that would be serious, but 800 and dropping a little. . .it’s really nothing.   There’s a substantial chance that the race for the Democratic nomination will come down to Harris against Warren.     

            Donald Trump, who overperformed by 9 points in yesterday’s poll, is also up 52 points in today’s standings. In his case, all that that means is that the Republicans, who had been disappearing from my polls entirely, are starting to come back to it for some reason.   This is the second straight poll in which Trump has outperformed expectations, which I am very glad to see.  His unrealistically low numbers in my polling did not indicate weakness on his part; it simply meant that my voters were not representative of the whole electorate.   Which they’re still not, of course, but this is less true now than it was ten days ago.  Trump’s score has jumped from 273 to 394 in the last eight days.  It probably, realistically, should be somewhere around 1,000; Twitter just leans left. 

            Stacey Abrams, who is not actually running at this time, has dropped 49 points since yesterday.  Abrams has said not too long ago that she was still considering getting into the race.  While I think it is very unlikely that she will enter the race, it is my opinion that she could sit on the sidelines perhaps as long as until November, and still make a showing in Iowa and New Hampshire.   Between now and November a lot of people will drop out of the race, and dissatisfaction with the remaining choices will begin to boil.   Someone who enters late would have the opportunity to take advantage of that.  

            An odd note is that although Abrams had a terrible poll yesterday and dropped 49 points as a result of it, she actually came off the "gray list".  In the chart below I highlight candidates who have dropped 25% in the last 30 days in gray.  Abrams was gray yesterday and had a terrible day, but exactly 30 days ago she had an even more terrible day relative to where she was then, so that whereas yesterday she was down 30-some percent in the last 30 days, now she is down only 16%. 

            And Pete Buttigieg has also dropped by 49 points.   Buttigieg, who has had a kind of magic carpet ride for the last two months, is dealing with a serious challenge for the first time.  

            My guess is that Buttigieg’s support cannot evaporate too rapidly, because there is a hunger in the LGBT community for someone to carry the banner for them.   I think that if he handles the South Bend police shooting crisis reasonably well, he will hang in the race as one of the top three to five Democrats probably until the actual voting starts.  

            These are the updated standings:

            Thanks for reading.