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Do You Buy That … Today’s Polls Show Who Will Win The Democratic Nomination?

Do You Buy That … Democratic Voters Want A New 2020 Candidate?

This article is adapted from FiveThirtyEight’s weekly “Do You Buy That?” segment on “This Week.”

The New York Times and The Washington Post recently reported that some influential Democrats are clamoring for new candidates to enter the 2020 presidential race. Sure, there are 17 “major” candidates15 already running, but Democratic bigwigs are apparently convinced that that isn’t enough, and want someone — Hillary Clinton, or Sherrod Brown, or John Kerry, or Michael Bloomberg — to come to the rescue.

Is this a real possibility?

I can’t read the minds of any of those bold-faced names, all of whom have reportedly been urged by Democratic donors to enter the race. But I think these donors are out to lunch — and out of touch: I don’t buy that Democratic voters really want another candidate. And even if the voters did, I don’t think the new candidate would find it so easy to succeed.

First, Democratic voters are extremely happy with the field as is. According to a July poll by the Pew Research Center, 65 percent of Democrats rate their field as “excellent” or “good.” That’s essentially tied with 2008 for the highest enthusiasm Pew has ever found among Democrats:

Democrats really like their 2020 choices

Percentage of Democrats* with each opinion of that cycle’s presidential primary field

Cycle
Poor
Only fair
Good
Excellent




2020
5%
25%
42%
23%


2016
12
36
37
14


2008
2
29
49
15


2004
5
39
40
4


1992
11
38
24
3

* Includes registered voters who identified as Democrats or “leaned” toward the Democratic Party.

The Pew surveys were conducted in the year before each election — in July for 2020, in September for 2016, 2008 and 2004, and in October for 1992.

Source: Pew Research Center

And the numbers may have only improved since then — a HuffPo/YouGov poll conducted last week found 83 percent of Democrats were satisfied with their choices.

Second, late-entering candidates don’t exactly have a stellar track record. Remember Fred Thompson in 2008? Or Wesley Clark in 2004? Or even Rick Perry in 2012? Well, maybe not. These candidates were supposed “white knights” who entered their races late — and completely flopped. It’s not easy running for president — setting up campaign offices, public relations teams, a fundraising apparatus, etc. all takes time — and it’s no coincidence that the leading candidates got into the race early.

There’s another reason that new 2020 contender talk is likely empty speculation: Democratic donors are supposedly concerned about the flaws of the current candidates, but the names they’re floating are … deeply flawed. Democratic voters don’t want a blast from the past like Hillary Clinton, for example; in polling of Iowa caucus-goers by the Des Moines Register from late last year, 72 percent of Democrats said Clinton would detract from the field. Brown is at least pretty popular, but polls of Bloomberg’s favorable ratings show middling results at best.

Moreover, Democratic voters prize electability. And Clinton and Kerry aren’t exactly the first people you’d associate with winning a general election. Conversely, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren all lead President Trump in general election polls. (No, you shouldn’t take these polls too seriously, but they’re worth considering in this context.)

In all, I’d be very surprised if Clinton, Kerry, Bloomberg or any other big-name Democrat became a major factor in this race, let alone won the nomination. It’s a little more feasible that donors dissatisfied with the front-runners will line up behind one of the candidates who is already running, such as Cory Booker or Amy Klobuchar.

In the end, though, I think this talk of Clinton or Bloomberg is a sign of two things: first, the media getting bored with the race and searching for a new storyline. And second, the establishment’s influence is declining as candidates like Warren and Sanders are succeeding without taking their money. Some big donors might simply want back in on the action.

We’re tracking impeachment polls; check them out!

Politics Podcast: What The Latest Impeachment Testimony Means For The White House

By Galen Druke, Clare Malone, Nate Silver and Micah Cohen, Galen Druke, Clare Malone, Nate Silver and Micah Cohen, Galen Druke, Clare Malone, Nate Silver and Micah Cohen and Galen Druke, Clare Malone, Nate Silver and Micah Cohen












 












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The senior U.S. diplomat to Ukraine, William Taylor, testified Tuesday that President Trump held military aid to Ukraine until the president of Ukraine would publicly announce investigations into the Bidens and Ukrainian interference into the 2016 election. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses the significance of the testimony and what it means for Republicans and Democrats going forward.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Is There A Problem With How The Media Covers Elizabeth Warren?

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): In recent months, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has come a long way in the polls. When she first announced she was considering running for president on Dec. 31, her numbers hovered in the low single digits, but now she’s comfortably in the double digits and poised to steal the number one spot from former Vice President Joe Biden, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average of the 2020 Democratic primary.

And for the most part, this rise has been accompanied by positive media attention for Warren, with glowing profiles and the like. But is there actually a problem in the way the media covers Warren, i.e., are we too cozy with her candidacy?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): I should state off the bat that this is such an interesting question in part because Warren is SO MANY things: She’s a left-leaning (too left-leaning for most of America?) candidate, the emerging co-front-runner and an older woman running four years after another older woman lost for the Democrats.

That said, I do think we’re seeing the embryonic stages of Warren coverage. She’s currently getting nicer coverage, and I think we haven’t seen as many storylines that delve into questions like: a) Are some of her political stances going to play in swing states, and b) Will her wealth tax work/is it constitutional?

And yeah, I do think that’s going to come later because the media and its dominant demographic group (college-educated white people) are Warren’s base.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): For the past several months, I think Warren’s gotten the most friendly stretch of media coverage of any presidential candidate since Barack Obama in 2008. It can change, though. Obama also had phases in 2008 where he got very skeptical coverage. And Warren’s media coverage upon her announcement wasn’t very friendly, for instance. In fact, much of it centered on her decision to take a DNA test to prove her Native American ancestry.

clare.malone: What do you think the first wave of skeptical Warren coverage will be, Nate? Will it be health care stuff, a la “is it too left for the white non-college-educated voter in the Upper Midwest the Democrats need to win back?”

natesilver: I mean the first wave was POCAHONTAS and LIKABILITY.

So we’re talking about the second wave.

clare.malone: OK, I STAND CORRECTED.

What’s the second wave?

natesilver: THANKS CLARE.

I mean, we might see POCAHONTAS and LIKABILITY/ELECTABILITY and the TOO FAR TO THE LEFT arguments again.

clare.malone: I think “too far to the left” will become the next big thing for her. I wonder if that won’t become a more explicit line from Biden in the next debate.

natesilver: And in some sense, that’s a fairer critique. There’s a decent amount of evidence that candidates who are too far to the left or right are a bit less electable than candidates who are moderate. Meanwhile, there’s not as much evidence that women are less electable or less likable, and those critiques are often fairly gendered.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I tend to think that a candidate with this kind of surge in the polls is going to get good media coverage no matter what, because the political press is obsessed with the horse race.

I also think part of what we are seeing is that the press, and I would argue to some extent college-educated people in general — especially white, college-educated liberals — have gotten more liberal on issues like racial and gender inequality. In terms of media coverage, that has meant that coverage around Warren’s DNA test was harsh, but so has been the coverage of Biden allegedly touching women without their consent or that of his comments highlighting his positive relationships with segregationist senators. I think some of the coverage around “electability” has been maybe not as been as anti-Warren as it could have been for this same reason. Electability often gets cast as the idea that a woman or a minority can’t win — so my guess is some in the press have downplayed the issue a bit for that reason.

sarahf: So David Byler of the Washington Post wrote a piece last Thursday arguing: 1) There have been some press-worthy developments in Warren’s campaign as of late, i.e., she’s on the tails of Biden (and maybe overtaking him). So that’s huge and one reason she’s getting so much coverage; but 2) Warren is also the kind of candidate journalists love to cover — because she’s running on policy ideas, “rather than issues such as electability and style that they see as lesser or maybe even distasteful.”

How do we reconcile Nos. 1 & 2? And what do we make of that claim in No. 2?

clare.malone: Yeah, I mean, I do think her steady rise in the polls is grounds for worthwhile coverage.

And I do think the fact that Democrats might elect another older white woman is interesting! You could read it as a middle finger to Trump just as much as a problem of electability.

natesilver: I’m not sure it’s that complicated? Journalists are disproportionately college educated, so campaigns that are attuned to a college-educated audience are probably going to resonate more with journalists in all sorts of tangible and intangible ways.

Pete Buttigieg has gotten pretty good coverage too, maybe the most favorable after Warren’s. And his supporters are super college educated.

Kamala Harris (also lots of college-educated support) hasn’t gotten great coverage lately, but she’s still probably gotten better coverage than Biden or Bernie Sanders, who are doing MUCH better than she is in the polls!

sarahf: That’s fair. But remember that piece from the New York Times earlier this year that argued that the Democratic electorate on Twitter had an outsized voice in the primary compared to the actual Democratic electorate? Do we think there’s evidence of that happening here?

natesilver: I think that’s also a factor. Journalists spend a lot time on Twitter. And Twitter ********loves******* Elizabeth Warren.

clare.malone: I mean, Biden’s team loves to talk about this: how their strategy is to give voice to the people not on Twitter — largely older voters, voters of color or voters without a college education.

natesilver: I think those critiques from Biden’s team are mostly valid. And you see it in the polling coverage. I’d argue that polls that show Warren tied or ahead of Biden generate tons of coverage. The ones that still show Biden ahead don’t.

clare.malone: I agree.

natesilver: In some sense, that’s why I focus the most on the way that polls are covered.

It’s complicated to determine, objectively, whether Warren has more thorough policy ideas than her competition. And in some sense, I’d have no problem with her getting “better” coverage if she does.

perry: Yeah, I’m not sure a content analysis of a full year of media coverage would reveal that it’s been more favorable to Warren than, say, Buttigieg or Harris or even Biden. In fact, I’d argue the electability and “eliminating private insurance coverage” has not been great for Warren, and that latter story has been covered pretty extensively.

But I do think that a poll of Twitter users would be way more pro-Warren and anti-Biden than the polls are. And I think that makes me constantly remember to use Twitter for news updates, not to gauge where the electorate is.

clare.malone: Agree with that, Perry. The interesting thing is, Biden isn’t all that conservative of a Democrat.

He’s decently liberal!

natesilver: But polls are fairly simple, objective facts. So when you see certain types of polls hyped up and others ignored, that’s a relatively clean indication of the biases of the moment.

sarahf: Which polls do you think are being ignored Nate?

Biden just got one good poll in South Carolina, and it got some coverage, no?

natesilver: Really? Biden got a pretty good (Fox News) poll in Wisconsin this weekend, and it got almost no coverage.

The Morning Consult poll that still shows Biden well ahead of Warren nationally gets very little coverage. The HarrisX polls that show the same thing don’t, either.

clare.malone: Biden’s polling news cycles have tended to focus more on general election head-to-heads, I think.

natesilver: Yeah, Biden’s general election polls do get some coverage, and they probably shouldn’t! Because those polls don’t mean all that much at this stage! But early primary polls are reasonably predictive, and if you were just reading Twitter, you’d get the sense that Biden had crashed. He hasn’t really though — he’s fallen by just a couple of points in the averages, while Warren has risen a lot.

clare.malone: We like to cover a moving car rather than an idling one.

The royal media “we,” I mean.

perry: The main issue for me in analyzing the race is that many of the people I follow on Twitter for non-political reasons — say, for their expertise on economics, gender or race — tend to like Warren and not Biden. I don’t even think Obama in ‘08 was thought of as the “candidate of the experts” like Warren is because Clinton was also fairly well-liked by wonky people. So we have this weird dichotomy, and I have to constantly check the polls and be like, “Is Biden still doing well? Yes, he is.”

natesilver: Another element here is that both Biden and Sanders are old news, whereas Warren is a newer and fresher story. Also, some of Sanders’s staffers and some of his supporters are not exactly the nicest people to the press.

clare.malone: Some of this comes back to the emerging progressive movement in the party, though, and much of the base isn’t really aware of this. Lots of Democratic voters liked, and now want a return to an Obama-style, establishment Democratic Party. They want to reset the clock. But the politically tuned-in people and policy experts of the Democratic Party have already moved like five ticks over on the progressivism odometer in the last four years.

There’s a dissonance that’s powerful, and you see it in news coverage.

sarahf: But to Clare’s point, what really surprised me in Perry’s piece on why Harris isn’t doing better is that the candidates who have made claims to Obama’s legacy (think Harris, Cory Booker, Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke) aren’t doing better. Combined, they’re polling at 14 percent in national polls. As Perry wrote, this is pretty strong evidence “suggesting that Democratic voters aren’t looking for an Obama re-run.”

perry: It is worth considering that Warren is actually running a better campaign than Biden? Like, the idea of releasing a fairly-aggressive leftward policy plan each week or so was pretty savvy. I do think Warren has more aggressive plans than Biden — and that creates news coverage, too. Warren also was among the first Democratic presidential candidates to call for Trump’s impeachment. So the fact that Warren is gaining on Biden is not entirely shocking.

clare.malone: That’s a very interesting question … I think you can’t say Biden is running a terrible campaign given the way they were able to ride out the summer’s pretty bad bumps. But Warren’s campaign has had a very solid communications ethos and effort since the very beginning — I’d argue since they ran that “angry woman” last September.

Brett Kavanaugh was allowed to be angry. Dr. Ford wasn’t. Women grow up hearing that being angry makes us unattractive. Well, today, I’m angry – and I own it. I plan to use that anger to take back the House, take back the Senate, & put Democrats in charge. Are you with me? pic.twitter.com/c9DebKTQEV

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) September 30, 2018

The Warren campaign has a knack for knowing the sort of blend of righteous anger and wonkery that suits them best.

natesilver: But I think Warren sometimes gets credit for being apolitical when that’s sort of bullshit, and she’s just as much of a politician as anyone else. Almost all of her plans are pretty well-calibrated to appeal to the Democratic base.

Maybe it just so happens that’s what she believes, but there’s not a lot of heterodoxy in what she’s offering.

But there’s also stuff like Warren being against the expansion of nuclear power. I hesitate to characterize the views of entire groups of scientists, but my understanding is that most scientists who are concerned about climate change would support expanding nuclear power. Warren doesn’t support it though, probably because it isn’t very popular among Democrats.

clare.malone: She’s a first mover on a lot of issues.

She’s not afraid to be out there, and I think that’s unique, given how conservative a lot of national politicians are.

perry: I agree that Warren is not taking stands that are going to piss off a lot of Democrats. She is quite political, I agree. I just think she might have arrived at a strategy that has worked well: being extra to the left and framing herself as “having a plan.”

natesilver: It’s smart politics! Part of smart politics is doing things that the press will like!

One of the most depressing parts of covering primary elections is that kissing the media’s ass and providing lots of access to the candidate is probably very “worth it” in terms of the coverage that candidates receive.

clare.malone: Ah. I think that we’ve landed in interesting territory re: access.

Biden’s campaign has gotten media people irritated by not letting him talk more. He just doesn’t do a lot of TV or a lot of on the record, regular media sitdowns.

He even got called out this summer by the hosts of The Breakfast Club (a New York City radio show ) for offering a surrogate when other candidates were appearing directly.

natesilver: And Biden had a pretty friendly relationship with the press as VP.

perry: Buttigieg did the media access thing hard early on in his campaign, and I thought that would really take off for him. It helped him get that initial burst but that was it. I’m kind of surprised by it — I thought Buttigieg was rising the media wave just right.

natesilver: Maybe he’s still overperforming right now, Perry?

I mean, he’s probably in fourth place in the polls now.

A distant fourth, granted, but it’s not bad for the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, to be beating all these senators.

clare.malone: I think he’s gotten slammed by the fact that we only really talk about it as a three-person race of late.

Fair or not, he could still get an Iowa storyline, and that could buoy him.

natesilver: It’s a two-person race, Clare.

(TROLL BAIT!!!)

clare.malone: I will let the trolls take that.

But … here’s a question: Are we maybe more aware and, therefore, more OK with talking about these media coverage biases than we were in 2016?

Or was it the same then, too?

I ask because I’ve noticed a bit more meta-awareness by the media in the way we’re covering things. But unfortunately, people who get their news from Twitter and people who get their news from, say, TV are so disconnected by medium — and probably lifestyle — that they get a fragmented sense of the race. (And, obviously, this problem can be exacerbated if reporters tend to get more of their news from Twitter than TV.)

All of this is to say: I think we’ll probably continue to see tougher coverage of Biden in part because of some of the biases we’ve talked about in the media, but also because he’s just running a campaign that, at times, seems more tentative and conservative in its approach. And that gives room for doubt and perhaps induces more reporting on an imminent polling slump or whatever.

natesilver: Maybe there’s more meta-awareness, as Clare puts it. But I think it’s hard for journalists to recognize just how wrapped up everything is in the horse-race narrative. When a candidate is rising in the polls, everything is deemed to be good news for them.

We’re Changing How We Think About The NBA

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With the NBA preseason officially underway, we’re unveiling something new. Since 2015, FiveThirtyEight has put out forecasts for the NBA season based on player ratings from ESPN and Basketball-Reference.com. But this year, we created our own player rating metric — called RAPTOR — which will power this season’s forecast. FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver joins for a segment of Model Talk to help us understand how RAPTOR works.

After a pro-Hong Kong tweet from Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, the NBA found itself plunged into a geopolitical scandal. FiveThirtyEight senior sportswriter Chris Herring joins the show to unpack why a league that is no stranger to political confrontation is struggling to respond.

Finally, our Rabbit Hole pays its respect to Sara’s Minnesota Twins. After a record-breaking season, their playoff hopes ended in a far more unfortunate record.

Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

A well-rounded look at the NBA’s ambitions abroad from The New York Times Magazine.
A focus on the Washington Mystics’ Emma Meesseman as we await Game 4 of the WNBA Finals on Tuesday.

Politics Podcast: Is Ukraine Getting Worse For Trump?

By Galen Druke, Nate Silver, Clare Malone and Micah Cohen, Galen Druke, Nate Silver, Clare Malone and Micah Cohen, Galen Druke, Nate Silver, Clare Malone and Micah Cohen and Galen Druke, Nate Silver, Clare Malone and Micah Cohen












 












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It’s now been almost two weeks since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry. In the past week, the House began taking testimony, at least one more whistleblower came forward, and FiveThirtyEight launched our impeachment polling tracker. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew takes a look at what’s happened over the past week and whether public opinion is still evolving.

The team also discusses former Vice President Joe Biden’s position in the Democratic primary, especially his standing with black voters.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Do You Buy That… Impeachment Will Energize Trump’s Base And Boost Him In 2020?

How Could Impeachment Affect The Democratic Primary?

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Stories around the allegations that President Trump used the power of the presidency to seek dirt on his political rival in a phone call to the Ukrainian president in July are moving fast. The House has opened an official impeachment inquiry into the president, and some Democrats have even suggested they’ll draft articles of impeachment by Thanksgiving.

But there’s also an election going on (in case you forgot) … so how does the question of whether Congress should move to impeach Trump affect the Democratic primary?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): Well, since Sept. 20 — which is both the day the Wall Street Journal broke the news that the whistleblower complaint alleged that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and, not coincidentally, the last time I really thought about the 2020 Democratic primary — Sen. Elizabeth Warren has gained significantly in the Real Clear Politics average, and Biden has slipped.

And I think there are lots of reasons to believe this story would help Warren and hurt Biden.

Warren was one of the first 2020 candidates to come out in favor of impeachment, back in April, and she has been one of the clearest candidates about where she stands on the issue.

So given that support for impeachment has increased among Democrats, as our tracker of impeachment polls shows, I think a sense of urgency among Democrats to impeach Trump could help Warren.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I disagree with this take pretty strongly.

nrakich: Oh good! I was afraid we were all going to agree.

perry: I don’t think the “scandal” (Biden himself did nothing wrong; his son, Hunter Biden, seems to have done something that is perhaps not ideal but not illegal) will hurt Biden among Democratic voters who were already seriously considering voting for him.

Basically everyone in the party is defending him, and I suspect that the people who are likely to say this is a problem for him (by showing he and his family made money through politics/cronyism) were already Warren or Bernie Sanders supporters.

Impeachment is the position of the Democratic Party, and Biden is in line with that. He and Warren are not that different on this issue now.

nrakich: But doesn’t it show leadership on Warren’s part that she was one of the first to call for impeachment?

As for Biden himself, I don’t think a lot of Democrats buy what Trump is selling — that Biden’s activities in Ukraine were corrupt. But I think it could pierce his aura of electability if Democrats worry that it’s something that could be used against him in a general election.

sarahf: Yeah, I tend to agree with Perry, but do think there is a “tug-of-war” around media narratives right now involving the Ukraine scandal, and while Fox News has been the main outlet focusing more on Biden’s involvement in Ukraine, rather than Trump’s conduct, the déjà vu to 2016 makes me think this has the potential to overtake/overshadow the primary.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I think impeachment is pretty clearly good news for Warren. But that’s not mutually exclusive with it being good news for Biden. My initial instinct was that it could help Biden in some ways because (1) Democrats would have to come to his defense, and (2) it makes Trump looks like he fears Biden, which bolsters his electability case. My second instinct, though, is that it isn’t so helpful for Biden.

Why? It’s not so much because his vague aura of electability might suffer, although maybe there’s some of that. But more because it requires a campaign that can be nimble and react to unpredictable news developments in real time, and I’m not really sure that campaign is Biden’s — they’ve run a very risk-averse strategy so far.

perry: But I think Biden is smart to lean into this and basically argue, “I’m so electable that Trump is already trying to cheat to beat me.” That seems like a good argument to me, particularly in the Democratic primary. That argument also seems true!

natesilver: It’s a pretty decent argument!

Another dimension to all this is that if impeachment is in the news all the time, it’s bad news for any candidate who isn’t one of the front-runners now. Since the story occupies a lot of media bandwidth that could be spent on, I dunno, a Cory Booker surge, or whatever.

perry: But in general, I do think a fast-moving event favors Warren, just because her strategy (run to the left) is easy to execute and Biden’s (figure out where the middle of the electorate is) is a bit harder. And if this moves to the Senate, you can imagine Warren being like, “Let’s convict” and Biden being less eager to say that.

nrakich: Maybe this is a bad analogy, but I think maybe the impeachment issue is to Warren as the Iraq War was to Barack Obama in 2008. He had a clear anti-war stance and no past baggage on the issue (unlike Hillary Clinton, who had voted for the war), and that really gave him credibility on an important issue to Democratic primary voters.

Furthermore, Warren’s steady rise in the polls actually started around the time she came out in favor of impeachment in April — although there were also a lot of other factors at play, so we can’t say for sure it was the reason she caught fire.

sarahf: I mean, to some extent, though, this has to be objectively better for anyone who isn’t Biden, because being dragged through the mud on this scandal (regardless of whether any wrongdoing actually happened) isn’t great PR.

And while the Biden campaign has tried to put the kibosh on stories that Biden did anything wrong, I do find it astounding that a Monmouth poll this week found that 42 percent of voters think Biden “probably did” pressure Ukrainian officials to not investigate his son’s business interests.

perry: I still think the number of Biden Democratic primary supporters leaving him over this is close to zero, and the number of Democrats who were thinking about voting for Biden who will be bothered by this is also close to zero.

What percentage of that 42 percent will vote for Trump? Probably most of them.

nrakich: Yeah, and that’s borne out by the crosstabs of that poll — Democrats said 65 percent to 19 percent that Biden “probably did not” inappropriately pressure Ukraine. But as I said above, it’s not about Democrats leaving Biden because they believe the allegations. It’s about them getting scared that he now has a scandal, however unsubstantiated, that could hurt him in the general election.

perry: So they choose Warren instead?

Does that seem likely to you?

natesilver: Yeah I’m with Perry on this!

I think voters aren’t taking “electability” quite as literally as you or I might.

Otherwise they’d consider Amy Klobuchar really electable or whatever, because she’s from a swing-ish state and has won by big margins before.

nrakich: Nate, I agree that the ordinary voter may not spend a lot of time diving into a candidate’s average overperformance above partisan lean or whatever — but I think simpler concepts like “scandals hurt your chances of winning” can resonate. This may be one of the lessons many people took from 2016 (along with, maybe, “America isn’t ready to elect a woman president”) — that even an overhyped scandal like the one over Clinton’s emails can cost someone an election.

And Perry, Warren doesn’t need all those ex-Biden voters to flock to her. She is doing fine on her own. If Biden drops to 15 percent, Warren will probably be in first place by default.

sarahf: I’m not sure we’ll see mass defection from Biden over this. But I do think Warren stands to benefit, however marginally, just by not being at the center of it all. I still think that while the Ukraine situation might not be bad for Biden, it’s not great either.

perry: Part of why I don’t think this will hurt Biden with voters who care a lot about electability is because the rest of the really viable candidates don’t scream electable (the white woman, the black woman, the socialist, the 37-year-old) in the way that voters typically think about electability.

natesilver: We also haven’t really seen how perceptions of Warren change now that she’s perceived by the media as a front-runner — maybe even the front-runner — instead of an underdog. I do wonder if there’s a bit of recency bias in how we’re covering that too.

nrakich: Right. I fully expect a scrutiny cycle for Warren coming up.

But I think that’s outside the purview of this chat!

natesilver: I mean, in some ways, you’d think that Biden could gain ground by saying, “While all these other Democrats are out there talking about impeachment, I’m talking about how we can BEAT Donald Trump based on issues that matter to the middle class,” etc.

Except that… the scandal at the heart of Democrats’ best impeachment case directly involves him!

sarahf: I do wonder, though, how much people are generally factoring impeachment into how they think about either a) the candidates or b) the election, period. Granted, this CNN poll is from March, but what stood out to me in that poll is that no one named the Russia investigation as their top issue for 2020. Do you think we’re headed toward a similar outcome here? Or is the dynamic different?

natesilver: At the very least, Democratic voters’ focus on impeachment is likely to increase now that all the party leaders and candidates back it.

perry: Where there might be a shift is in how the primary is fought. Basically every debate up to now has had this super-boring Medicare for All vs. Medicare “for everyone who wants it” discussion. But does that go away now? Are the terms of the campaign now different?

sarahf: Do you think there will now be more questions about whether the candidates support impeachment?

perry: Not impeachment. But the debates have all been very policy-focused. And now I wonder if they will be more about democratic norms and values. “Should Trump be removed from office?” is certainly a question that will be asked.

nrakich: Yeah, the irony of this whole thing is that impeachment is actually an irrelevant topic for a presidential campaign. If any of these people wins the White House, Trump will be out of office anyway!

perry: But impeachment is in the news, and I think it’s more interesting than restating everyone’s Medicare position. It could lead to more interesting questions, too. For example, Kamala Harris’s idea to ban Trump from Twitter has come out of this whole discussion. My guess is Warren may be to the right of Harris on that.

nrakich: Oh, I agree that it will come up. I just find it funny.

natesilver: But calling on Twitter to kick Trump off, though, is (apart from the journalistic case against kicking Trump off Twitter) sort of daft strategically since Trump probably hurts himself politically (and maybe even legally) with his various outbursts on Twitter. You’ve also had Harris calling for Brett Kavanaugh’s impeachment if I’m not mistaken, which seemed very off-message for Democrats.

nrakich: Warren did as well.

perry: The primary has largely been a wonk-fest, which is good for wonky candidates (Warren) and candidates who clearly reject wonkiness (Biden). But maybe this is a new phase of the campaign and a different type of candidate emerges. Maybe someone like Pete Buttigieg who has campaigned a lot on norms and democratic values. He also speaks about foreign policy fairly fluently. I wonder if he can turn this moment into something.

sarahf: Given that support for impeachment is so high among Democrats, do you think any of the candidates have anything to lose by saying they support impeaching Trump?

natesilver: I dunno. If Harris is any indication, I don’t think it’s going to be very easy for any of the other low-polling Democrats to latch onto a good argument about impeachment.

perry: Right, now that impeachment is a position of the party, I think it’s hard to differentiate yourself on it.

natesilver: I guess you could argue it’s good for Tom Steyer, who really was out in front on impeachment.

nrakich: Yeah, by all rights, Steyer should get a boost from this, as he’s run so many TV ads on the topic. But I think your point above about the media oxygen being taken away from non-front-runners is a good one.

natesilver: Maybe in a weird way it’s good, too, for someone like Andrew Yang, because he’s the most unconventional candidate and can counterprogram the most. It’s not like he’s been relying on much traditional media attention anyway.

Like, if you’re airing something alongside the Super Bowl, you don’t want to be showing a college football game. You want something really different.

nrakich: Like the Puppy Bowl???

sarahf: Tulsi Gabbard certainly held out on supporting impeachment — but to Nate’s earlier point, I’m not sure talking impeachment will help differentiate any of the candidates already struggling in the polls.

But OK, if the conversation does become more about norms and values and how we think about the office of the presidency, does that actually change the primary that much?

natesilver: I guess one way it could be bad for Warren is if it makes the debates less policy-driven. Then again, I’m not sure if Warren is benefiting from her policy positions so much as being branded as The Policy Candidate.

nrakich: One point worth reiterating is that we’re still probably very early in the Trump/Ukraine/impeachment story timeline. The story will continue to evolve, and we don’t know where that will take the political conversation.

perry: After the El Paso shooting, Beto O’Rourke was in the news a lot. But his numbers didn’t move, and that tells me that he is still very unlikely to break through. And so while this feels like the kind of story where Buttigieg can come in and say, “This is another example of how Washington is broken and we need fresh faces,” I would not be surprised if he didn’t gain in the polls either.

A lot of what we are seeing in the polls right now is Warren gaining from Harris, Sanders and, to some extent, Biden. So I think the biggest shift for Warren, as Nate was hinting at, is not her stance on impeachment, but that she is now doing so well that her rivals will attack her more and the media will increase its scrutiny of her. Perhaps this is an atmosphere in which the primary is shaken up a bit. Warren has already kind of won the college-educated, Hillary Clinton-voter mini primary over Harris and in some ways has won the populist mini primary over Sanders, too. But what happens next is unclear.

We’re tracking impeachment polls; check them out!

Politics Podcast: Impeachment Is Becoming More Popular

By Galen Druke, Nate Silver and Micah Cohen, Galen Druke, Nate Silver and Micah Cohen and Galen Druke, Nate Silver and Micah Cohen












 












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It’s now been almost a week since Speaker Pelosi announced an official impeachment inquiry of President Trump. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew takes stock of how much public opinion has changed since Pelosi spoke, and what polls tell us about the road ahead. The team also discusses Elizabeth Warren’s rise in recent polls and debates when it might be fair to consider her the frontrunner.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Do You Buy That… Public Opinion On Impeachment Is Shifting?