Poll Report May 26, 2019

            Kamala Harris was the big winner in Poll #47, getting 55% of the vote against Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang and the new kid on the block.   Actually the results were pretty much as we would have expected based on the previous polls, and the standings don’t change very much.  To reach that conclusion, we can start with yesterday’s rankings for these four candidates:

            The total of those four is 1,724, so that’s a fairly strong poll, a little stronger than average, although not as strong as today’s poll, which includes Joe Biden and  totals 2,251 points.  Yesterday’s candidates control 17% of the points in the system, whereas today’s candidate control 22%.    Harris had 891 of the 1,724, which is 52%, so we would expect her to get 52% in yesterday’s poll.   We would expect Sanders to get 28%, etc.:

            In fact, Harris got 55% to Sanders’ 23%, so Harris moves forward a little bit, and Sanders—who has been doing very, very poorly in my polls compared to the national polls, falls even further backward:

              So the poll, really, was pretty much as expected, and it doesn’t rattle the polls very much.   These are the updated standings:

              Based on the polling that I have done, I am now predicting that Bernie Sanders’ current standing in the national polls will prove to be a complete mirage, and Bernie will collapse in the voting, and either will be forced to pull out of the contest early next year or else will stagger on, becoming gradually irrelevant. 

            Bernie is a terrific campaigner, and an articulate spokesman for what he believes.   He has phenomenal energy for a man of his age, and actually, I agree with him on some issues.  But his moment has come and gone, and he does not have sufficient following to make a lasting stand in this contest—nor is he positioned to gain strength as the campaign rolls on.   The high standing in the national polls that Bernie now has is just an illusion created by poor polling methods, and it will evaporate as soon as the voting starts, or probably before then.  

            A lot of Bernie’s popularity in the 2016 campaign was based on the fact that he was running against an absolutely horrible candidate who couldn’t even beat Donald Trump.   The deck had been stacked in Hillary’s favor by the Democratic Party, and everybody knew that the deck had been stacked in Hillary’s favor.  Hillary ran around the country advocating stupid shit and annoying people and talking endlessly about her resume, which nobody cared about.   This galvanized the opposition to her, which made Bernie look stronger than he really was—and, as I said, he’s a really good campaigner. 

            When you come into a campaign at a high point, riding a wave, it is very difficult to go down in the polls and then recover.   Bernie is going to go down in the polls.  Bernie—and Biden—are old men in a party that is looking for what’s next.   He’s going nowhere.  That’s my first prediction based on these polls.