Nate Silver's Blog, page 60

Is The 2020 Democratic Field Down To 10 Candidates?

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

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Wednesday marked the last day candidates could qualify for the Sept. 12 Democratic primary debate, and in the end there were 21 DNC-approved polls, with 10 candidates able to hit 2 percent support in four qualifying national or early-state polls1 and reach 130,000 unique donors (including at least 400 individual donors in at least 20 states).2

The ten candidates who have qualified are: Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang.

So now that we have one debate with the top 10 candidates, how’s that change the dynamics? Who could it help and who could it hurt?

micah (Micah Cohen, managing editor): No. 1 benefiter: Us. Back-to-back debate nights are horrible.

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): Yeah, now I get to watch UVA raise its national championship banner on Friday instead.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Yeah, it helps people who were hoping to make plans on Friday night. And — just full disclosure here — we think it’s pretty cool that the network we work for, ABC News, is gonna get to host the first debate where all the major candidates are on the same stage.

sarahf: Now, now — I meant this when I tweeted it earlier — it goes beyond self interest:

Welp, that was pretty anticlimactic, but I'm actually pretty excited for one debate night (and not just for self-interested reasons). Warren & Biden have yet to face off — and in theory, these are the 10 candidates voters are most interested in: https://t.co/nFc682fqn8

— Sarah E. Frostenson (@sfrostenson) August 28, 2019

micah: But Sarah, I assume you wanted a more substantive answer that readers will actually be interested in?

sarahf: Yeah, we’re finally about to watch the candidates people are (theoretically) most interested in!! And I, for one, am excited to see Warren and Biden go head-to-head.

What about you all?

micah: Yeah, that’s true. So maybe Democratic voters are the real beneficiaries.

natesilver: I’m not sure it helps voters, to be honest.

I think maybe it hurts voters.

What they could do instead is put all the good candidates on one night and then all the weird ones in a JV debate. That way, people who want to watch the weird candidates still can, but it doesn’t deprive them of the opportunity to see, say, Warren vs. Biden.

geoffrey.skelley: There were plenty of people in my Twitter mentions complaining that there should be two debates with smaller numbers. I think you arguably could have had Biden, Warren, Sanders, Harris and Buttigieg one night, and put the other five on the second night.

sarahf: Are we sure we think that’s a good idea? The JV debates were ridiculed on the GOP side during the 2016 primaries. I just think there’s no good way for the parties to handle the winnowing process, and the candidates had 21 polls to hit 2 percent in, so I’d argue these are the 10 candidates voters are most interested in hearing.

micah: OMG, we just got down to 10 candidates, and people are already complaining that that’s too many!!!?

geoffrey.skelley: In the context of one debate stage, yeah.

natesilver: It’s kind of been demonstrated by now that a candidate like Castro or Booker can have a pretty darn good night — and he or she is still overshadowed by what the 4-5 main candidates are doing.

Hell, have the JV debate first, and then have some system where whoever does best according to a poll of Democratic voters gets a seat on the second night.

geoffrey.skelley: Oh, now that’s fun.

micah: But this is certainly an improvement for voters over two 10-person debates.

Even by your logic, Nate.

sarahf: But OK … to get back on track …

geoffrey.skelley: Story of Sarah’s life as politics editor.

micah: OK, my

How Much Of A Threat Is Elizabeth Warren To Joe Biden’s Front-Runner Status?

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

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): On Monday, a new national Monmouth poll found that Joe Biden’s status as the 2020 Democratic front-runner may be in jeopardy. The former vice president is no longer the sole candidate at the top of the pack: Rather, the pollster found him, at 19 percent support, in a three-way tie for first with Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, both at 20 percent.

Of course, this is just one poll and Biden still has the highest polling average at 28 percent, according to Real Clear Politics. But it’s also possible that the dynamics of this race, which up until this point have been pretty stable, are finally shifting, with Biden on the decline and Warren and Sanders on the upswing.

In fact, could Warren be the new front-runner? She and Sanders are neck and neck in their RCP polling averages — and according to The Economist’s polling average, she’s actually now in second. What’s more, since Warren entered the race in January, she has steadily moved from polling in the single digits and fifth or sixth place nationally to the double digits and second and third place. So what evidence do we have to support the idea that Warren in the lead (or close to it)? Or if you don’t think Warren is the front-runner, who do you think is?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): I think Biden is still pretty clearly the front-runner. The vast majority of polls still give him a healthy lead.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): She’s not in the lead nationally. You could maaaaaayayayayayayaybe convince me that she’s the most likely to win the nomination, though.

nrakich: That said, if your question is, “Is Elizabeth Warren one of the two most likely Democratic nominees?” I would answer yes for sure.

natesilver: C’mon, that’s a cop-out, Nathaniel!

sarahf: srsly

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): Could we say that she is a front-runner? I think that’s becoming more and more plausible, and also maybe less of a cop-out.

Warren’s slow but steady growth in support is worth taking very seriously. Maybe she’s not the front-runner but she’s an increasingly serious threat to Biden.

And given the fact that we’ve heard over and over again that voters are concerned about nominating a woman, Warren’s increasing support is that much more impressive.

natesilver: I’d say she’s one of the 20 most likely winners.

nrakich: Fine, I’ll rephrase — I think Warren is the second-most likely nominee.

I still think Biden is the most likely.

Flag, planted.

natesilver: I feel like someone has to play devil’s advocate here.

Maybe I’ll do that? Even though I’m not totally sure I buy it?

sarahf: So, I realize Monmouth is just one poll. And of course, Monmouth wasn’t even the only poll to drop Monday. Morning Consult also released its weekly tracking poll, which found Biden in the lead with 33 percent, Sanders in second with 20 percent and Warren in third at 15 percent. So Nathaniel is right that Biden is still the front-runner — I’m not really disputing that.

What I am curious to know is whether the tides are changing and there is evidence that Warren could usurp the lead.

natesilver: Oh, my devil’s advocate case wouldn’t even reference the Monmouth poll at all. Because I’m a good devil’s advocate, not a facetious one.

sarahf: Ha, so what’s the devil’s advocate argument here?

natesilver: The devil’s advocate case is just that she’s been moving up steadily, she’s the most likely candidate to win Iowa, she has the best favorables in the field, she might have the best campaign organization and Biden — although probably a little UNDER-rated on balance — has a lot of vulnerabilities.

sarahf: Huh, I guess I don’t think of that as a devil’s advocate argument. Sounds like an explanation for why Warren is now in second or third, depending on what polling average you look at, and a reason why she might continue to climb upward in the polls.

nrakich: Here’s how I think the argument goes for why Warren isn’t in first place today but might wind up on top: We don’t hold a national primary day. If we did, Biden would be on much safer ground with his polling lead. But as it stands, Warren has a clear path to winning the first three primary states:

As Nate alluded to, Warren is a good fit for Iowa. She has led some polls there, and she’s not that far behind Biden in others. Relatedly, Biden is relatively weak in Iowa, as Nate wrote recently — he has just the fifth-best favorable rating of any candidate there. (And guess who’s in first?)



Warren is better-liked than Biden in Iowa

Average favorability of Democratic primary candidates in Iowa polls

Favorable
Unfavorable


Candidate
Strongly
Somewhat
Total
Somewhat
Strongly
Total




Warren
46%
34%
80%
6%
4%
11%


Harris
40
33
73
6
4
10


Buttigieg
40
32
72
5
3
7


Sanders
32
37
68
15
9
24


Biden
31
36
67
16
8
24


Booker
22
42
63
10
3
13


Klobuchar
15
34
49
11
3
15


Castro
14
34
48
7
3
10


O’Rourke
12
40
52
13
6
19


Gillibrand
8
33
40
14
6
20


Gabbard
7
25
32
13
7
20


Delaney
5
20
25
13
7
20


Yang
5
18
23
14
6
19


Bullock
5
16
21
8
3
11


de Blasio
3
19
22
24
11
35


Bennet
3
16
19
9
3
12


Williamson
2
9
10
17
14
31


Ryan
2
14
16
13
5
18

Average of Iowa polls from Selzer & Co., Change Research and David Binder Research. Totals may not add up exactly due to rounding.

“Strongly” includes respondents who answered “very strongly”

Source: Polls

Plus, as a candidate from next-door Massachusetts, Warren already has home-field advantage in New Hampshire. And if she does win Iowa, that will give her a boost heading into the Granite State.
If she wins Iowa and New Hampshire, she will definitely have a boost going into the next state, Nevada. Nevada is also a heavily unionized state, which seems like a good fit for her. Plus, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is reportedly partial to Warren, and he might be willing to deploy his powerful turnout machine on her behalf. (Although Warren already has a pretty good campaign apparatus in Nevada on her own!)

So despite Biden’s lead in national polls, the actual state-by-state results might lead to a Warren nomination more often.

natesilver: Meh, I think the momentum shit is overrated.

The momentum shit from winning primaries, that is.

Like, it’s not nothing. It’s something! But, if you look at the Obama-Clinton contest in 2008, or Clinton-Sanders in 2016, the vast majority of who does better in which state is determined by demographics, not timing.

nrakich: Right, but I don’t think my argument relies on Warren winning, say, Iowa in order to keep her afloat in subsequent states. Warren has some natural advantages in New Hampshire and Nevada, too. Any momentum from winning previous states just makes her case for winning them even stronger.

natesilver: But then Biden wins South Carolina by six million points and who has the momentum on Super Tuesday?

ameliatd: On the demographics issue, one big question I have about Warren is how she will continue to broaden her support. She’s significantly more popular among white voters than black or Hispanic voters, and that could pose a serious problem for her.

nrakich: Combining Nate’s and Amelia’s points, certainly her weakness with black voters — who constitute almost a quarter of the Democratic primary electorate — is a problem for Warren.

natesilver: WhY aRe YoU gUyS eRaSiNg BeRnIe?

sarahf: Ha, I was just going to get to that.

Ostensibly, Warren and Sanders are roughly in the same place in the polls — Sanders has a poll average of 17.7 percent and Warren 16.0 percent, according to RCP. So are there actually two new front-runners?

ameliatd: How many front-runners is too many front-runners??

natesilver: Not in my view, no. I think Warren and Biden are No. 1 and 2 for likelihood of winning the nomination in some order, and I think Sanders is No. 3.

Why? First of all, Warren’s polls are a bit better than Sanders. She has roughly equal support nationally despite being less well known, and she has slightly better net favorables. She’s doing better in Iowa. And she has more upward momentum, although that can be overrated.

Second, if you put any weight on the sort of “party decides” view of the race, the party establishment seems to view her as being quite a bit more acceptable than Bernie, although she doesn’t have a ton of endorsements yet.

nrakich: Yeah, Sanders does not appear to be interested in expanding his coalition; he’s pretty much been stuck polling in the same 15-to-18 percent range since Biden entered the race, whereas Warren has been steadily winning people over. According to The Economist, only 38 percent of Democrats are considering voting for Sanders, whereas 49 percent are considering voting for Warren … which is even (slightly) more than the 48 percent who are considering voting for Biden!

ameliatd: Warren does seem to be doing quite a bit of work to position herself as a progressive candidate who’s also not a threat to the Democratic establishment — which is not Bernie’s typical M.O.

natesilver: That Economist poll has generally had good numbers for Warren, though. So I’d be a little careful there.

But polls do show that more informed voters are generally more into Warren than Sanders. So that’s another bad sign for Bernie (and Biden). As voters tune in, they seem to gravitate toward Warren more.

sarahf: I also thought the second quarter’s fundraising numbers were particularly telling when it came to support for Warren and Sanders. Warren tripled her numbers from the first quarter and raised the third-most from individual contributors, after Pete Buttiegieg and Biden (and before Sanders). And even though a greater percentage of Sanders’s donations currently come from small donors (or those giving $200 or less) than Warren, a Los Angeles Times analysis found that more than 80 percent of the donors who funded Sanders’s 2016 bid have not given to him this cycle, so this is, to me, evidence of a larger enthusiasm problem with Sanders.

And that’s important, because rightly or wrongly, Warren and Sanders are going to have to work to distinguish themselves from each other.

nrakich: I think they’re already distinguishing themselves, Sarah. Even though they’re not attacking each other, Warren has made clear efforts, as Amelia said, to show that she can play nice with the establishment. Sanders has continued to rail against economic and political institutions.

sarahf: And I guess at this point, Warren and Sanders’s bases are pretty different from each other, right?

natesilver: Well, part of the reason their bases are different now is because Warren has stolen most of the college-educated left from Bernie.

So what’s over in Sanders’s coalition is a bit eclectic — some real dyed-in-the-wool anti-establishment types, but also some non-college educated voters who aren’t necessarily that far to the left but like his populism or just like his message and personality.

nrakich: There is a big gender gap between Warren and Sanders, though. According to a Quinnipiac poll from early August, Sanders is second among men with 19 percent support, and Warren is third with 16 percent. But among women, Warren is second with 24 percent, and Sanders is third with 10 percent. (Biden is in first with both groups.)

sarahf: Are there more opportunities for Warren to continue to take voters away from Sanders? Or is she better off targeting voters from, say, Biden or Harris?

ameliatd: Isn’t Warren already siphoning some support from Harris? There seemed to be overlap between their supporters, at least earlier in the summer.

nrakich: Right. And my guess, Amelia, is that a lot of the voters who jumped on the Harris train after the first debate have since decamped to Warren.

And to Nate’s point, I suspect a lot of those 2016 Sanders voters without college degrees are now with Biden. So Sanders is kind of getting pinched from all sides.

natesilver: Yeah, I definitely think there’s evidence of a Harris-Warren overlap.

ameliatd: I also wonder how much some combination of sexism and electability concerns are holding Warren back, and how that will play out as the primary moves forward. There was some research earlier in the summer suggesting that both Warren and Harris were taking a hit among Democratic voters with more sexist views. And then there are the meta-sexism concerns from people who think a woman will have a harder time getting elected. As she continues to build support, maybe she’s chipping away at the latter? It’s obviously a hard thing to measure.

nrakich: Yeah, Amelia, maybe some voters have realized that Biden isn’t as electable as they thought, after seeing him struggle in the debates.

ameliatd: That would be my guess, Nathaniel. Although it’s interesting that Biden and Warren have yet to be on a debate stage together. If that happens next month (fingers crossed for one night!) maybe that shifts the dynamic between the two?

natesilver: It almost feels like there’s some weird shit like this going on, in terms of how voters are flowing between the candidates.

sarahf: Omg. What is that?

nrakich: Hahaha. I think that’s pretty good! My most recent piece on lanes in the Democratic primary indeed found that there is very little overlap between Sanders and Harris supporters, and not much between Warren and Biden supporters either.

ameliatd: But in terms of Warren being able to pull more supporters from Harris, a strong debate performance against Biden couldn’t hurt.

natesilver: IDK, if we’re forced to have two debates, the DNC could draw the rules up such that candidates who haven’t faced one another yet are more likely to be paired.

sarahf: I’m not so sure Warren can’t eat more into Biden’s support, though. Another thing that I thought was interesting in that Monmouth poll is that they found that among moderates who haven’t been paying as much attention, there is evidence they are swinging toward Sanders or Warren instead of toward a lesser-known candidate who might be more of an ideological fit.

And maybe this is just further proof that lanes don’t really exist, but it is interesting to me that among the more moderate candidates, there doesn’t seem to be an ordained alternative to Biden.

natesilver: Maybe it’s Buttigieg? But he’s still sort of a niche brand.

ameliatd: Is Harris’s name-recognition really that much lower than Warren or Sanders’s, though? It’s interesting, because moderates don’t seem to be flocking to her, and she’s someone who you think they’d be interested in.

natesilver: Yeah, I don’t know why there are so many WHY IS BIDEN STRUGGLING?!?!? takes when Harris is clearly the one who’s had a rough month or so in the polls.

nrakich: Amelia, 79 percent of Democrats can form an opinion of Harris, according to an average of August polls. That’s comparable to the 83 percent who can form an opinion of Warren. Biden and Sanders are noticeably higher — they have almost universal name recognition within the party.

sarahf: It’s true that Harris has had a much rougher month in the polls than Biden, but something else that stuck out to me in Nathaniel’s story was that Biden had the biggest drop of any candidate in his net favorability rating (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) — he dropped 8 points from May to August, and 17 points from the beginning of the year. So I think, even if Harris might be down more at this particular point in time, some of the conventional wisdom might be that she has more of an opportunity to gain back what she’s lost in the polls than Biden?

ameliatd: I wonder if Harris’s flaw is that she’s not so easily categorized. People know who she is, but she’s kind of been staking out a middle ground between the moderates and the liberals. Warren, on the other hand, has a clear brand, which could be helping her right now. Maybe there’s room for Harris to recover, though?

nrakich: Frankly, I think primaries are periods of ebbs and flows. Right now, Harris and Sanders are down, while Biden and Warren are up (Biden more in the absolute sense, Warren more in the relative sense). But Harris and Sanders have shown the ability to appeal to these now-Warren-and-Biden-supporters before. So if they campaign smartly, they could certainly gain them back.

natesilver: Yeah, Amelia, that was basically the critique I had of Harris: She’s trying to split the difference and it … isn’t working, right now at least. But a campaign like Harris’s, which doesn’t have as clearly defined of a base, is inherently liable to be more volatile than someone with more of a base of their own.

ameliatd: But Warren has been steadily gaining support for months. And that seems hard to dismiss, especially with all of this movement. Unless she eventually hits some kind of ceiling, of course.

nrakich: I think it’s definitely a good sign for Warren that her increase has been slow and steady, instead of a Buttigiegian “bump.”

sarahf: OK, pulse check. No one at the beginning of this chat was willing to say Warren is the front-runner, and maybe that’s still true. But let’s wrap by talking about where you see her in the race currently, and what you’re going to be watching for going forward.

natesilver: I’m gonna be watching for whether she can gain more traction with non-college educated voters, and with black voters. And I’m gonna be watching if she gets more endorsements. We haven’t really taken the time in this chat to make the case against Warren, but those three things above would be a big part of it.

ameliatd: I will be really curious to see what happens when Warren ends up on a debate stage with Biden, and whether that helps defuse any more electability concerns.

nrakich: I see Warren as a clear No. 2. And there are a couple of good indicators for her that, if she eventually overtakes Biden, we will point to as early signs of that. But I think I will mostly look to see if coverage of Biden continues to be skeptical and if his favorability ratings continue to decline.

natesilver: Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I sort of disagree with Rakich. I think Warren’s chances are more about Warren than Biden.

Biden’s at, IDK, 29 percent right now. And maybe 23 or 24 percent in Iowa or something. It shouldn’t be that hard for Warren to surpass him even if he doesn’t decline at all.

nrakich: Nate makes a good point, and I could easily see the race boiling down to Warren vs. Biden by Super Tuesday. But for Warren to become a favorite over Biden, as opposed to a co-front-runner? I think Biden has to help out with that.

ameliatd: Warren is gaining on Biden — and seems to be surpassing Sanders — but it’s probably still important to watch how she performs relative to Harris, too.

Despite having some overlap in supporters, they also haven’t gone after each other — does that start to change, if Harris sees Warren as a threat?

sarahf: Yeah, we didn’t really talk about the case against Warren — but I think Nate’s landed on one of her biggest vulnerabilities: Can she win over more voters who aren’t white? Currently, as you’ve all mentioned, the crosstabs aren’t really there, but if she can build support, I think she emerges as a true front-runner. Otherwise, I think someone like Biden (or Harris) continues to have broader appeal.

nrakich: Right, Sarah. There’s also the possibility her favorability ratings decline, too. There is ample opposition research against her, like her claims of Native American ancestry and her past as a Republican, that hasn’t come up a lot in recent months but could still hurt her.

Now that I think about it, one of the benefits to Warren’s steady rise, as opposed to a sudden surge, is that she didn’t immediately get thrust into the “discovery, scrutiny, decline” cycle. Her rise has been so gradual, it might have snuck up on people. So I guess another thing I’ll be looking for is if the media, voters and her opponents start assessing her more critically.

natesilver: We should also maybe be a little bit skeptical of candidates whose support is concentrated among college-educated white people, which happens to be the demographic that the media both caters to and belongs to.

Bernie’s support is actually notably more diverse than Warren’s, and Biden’s certainly is.

ameliatd: But I do think Warren has room to grow, especially among women, if voters are actually starting to be less concerned about electability. Granted, right now, she’s doing much better among white women than women of color right now — but that could change.

 

Politics Podcast: The Winnowing Begins

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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In the past few weeks, Rep. Seth Moulton, Gov. Jay Inslee and former Gov. John Hickenlooper have dropped out of the presidential race, with Hickenlooper declaring that he will run for U.S. Senate. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses what the early dropouts teach us about the Democratic Party and how the field may winnow going forward.

The team also debates how President Trump’s standing would be affected if the U.S. economy were to sour, given that there are some signs of global economic stress.

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 Monday evenings, with additional episodes throughout the week. 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.

Joe Biden Has An Iowa Problem, Not An Enthusiasm Problem

If you’ve been following our coverage of the Democratic primary, you’ll know that I don’t think much of media really understands Joe Biden’s popularity among Democrats. That doesn’t mean that Biden is destined to win the primary. In fact, I’d regard him as an underdog relative to the field — that is, I think he has a less than 50 percent chance of getting the nomination — partly for reasons I’ll outline later on in this column. But there have already been several occasions when despite widespread predictions of Biden’s demise, the former vice president rebounded or held steady in the polls.

Furthermore — not totally unlike Donald Trump four years ago — Biden’s support comes mostly from the type of Democrats who are sometimes relatively invisible in media coverage of the campaigns, such as black Democrats and older Democrats without college degrees. That’s another reason to be skeptical about claims that Biden isn’t as popular as polls seem to imply. They sometimes reflect narratives that are filtered through journalists’ college-educated social environments — or conditioned by conversations on social media — with all the implicit biases those can introduce.

So this article about Biden in The New York Times, which alleged a disconnect between the polls and conditions on the ground In Iowa, was a little dismaying for me. Here’s a representative snippet:

But less than two weeks before Labor Day, when presidential campaigns traditionally kick into high gear, there are signs of a disconnect between his relatively rosy poll numbers and excitement for his campaign on the ground here [in Iowa], in the state that begins the presidential nominating process.

The thing is, I actually think the Times is onto something here! But it’s something you can see in the polls. And it’s something that probably has a lot to do with Iowa, where the article was datelined from — and where there are relatively few voters from among the groups that are most enthusiastic about Biden.

One straightforward way for a poll to detect voter enthusiasm is simply for it to ask voters how strongly they feel about a particular candidate. Many polls, for example, ask voters whether they have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable view of the candidates. If the Times’s hypothesis is correct about Biden, we’d expect to see a lot of lukewarm support for him — plenty of voters in the “somewhat favorable” category, but relatively few in the “very favorable” bucket.

That’s not really what national polls show, though. I averaged data from the four polls I can find that were conducted after the Detroit debate — from Morning Consult, YouGov, HarrisX and Fox News1 — that asked Democratic voters the four-pronged favorability question I described above. By this measure, Biden had just as much enthusiastic support as any other Democrat. In the polling average, 36 percent of Democrats had a very or strongly favorable view of Biden, essentially the same as for Bernie Sanders (37 percent) and Elizabeth Warren (36 percent) and well ahead of the next Democrat, Kamala Harris, at 26 percent.2

There’s plenty of enthusiasm for Biden in national polls …

Average favorability of Democratic primary candidates in national polls

Favorable
Unfavorable


Candidate
Strongly
Somewhat
Total
Somewhat
Strongly
Total




Sanders
37%
39%
75%
12%
6%
18%


Biden
36
37
73
13
8
21


Warren
36
35
71
9
5
14


Harris
26
38
63
11
8
19


Buttigieg
21
28
49
11
5
16


O’Rourke
15
36
52
11
8
19


Booker
15
35
50
11
7
18


Castro
11
30
41
10
7
17


Yang
11
27
38
10
7
16


Klobuchar
10
25
34
12
7
19


Steyer
8
16
24
11
6
17


Gillibrand
7
32
39
12
9
20


Williamson
6
17
23
15
11
26


Gabbard
6
20
26
13
8
21


Bennet
6
16
22
10
6
16


De Blasio
5
21
26
17
12
29


Bullock
5
16
21
9
4
14


Sestak
5
10
15
10
6
16


Ryan
4
20
24
13
8
20


Delaney
3
17
20
11
8
19

Average of national polls from Morning Consult, YouGov, HarrisX and Fox News. Totals may not add up exactly due to rounding.

“Strongly” includes respondents who answered “very strongly”

Source: polls

Now, because more voters list Biden as their first choice than list Sanders or Warren, he probably does have his fair share of begrudging supporters. But it’s a fallacy to say that Biden doesn’t have enthusiastic supporters also. According to national polls, he has plenty — about as many as Sanders or Warren. On top of that, he also gets support from other Democrats who are less enthusiastic but support him for other reasons, e.g. electability. Those two paths to support are why Biden’s polling at almost 30 percent while Sanders and Warren are closer to 15 percent.

… And among attentive voters

Average of three Quinnipiac national polls conducted in July and August

Candidate
All Dems.
Attentive Dems.*




Biden
29%
30%


Warren
17
20


Harris
13
17


Sanders
13
10


Buttigieg
5
6


Booker
2
2


O’Rourke
2
1


Yang
1
1


Klobuchar
1
1


Gabbard
1
1


Castro
1
1


Williamson
0
1


Gillibrand
0
0


Delaney
0
0


Ryan
0
0


Bennet
0
0


Bullock
0
0


de Blasio
0
0


Sestak
0
0


Steyer
0
0

*Refers to Democrats who say they are paying “a lot” of attention to the campaign

Source: polls

Furthermore, Biden does plenty well with the most attentive voters, which isn’t quite the same thing as enthusiasm but is certainly related to it. (And in any event, it’s a bullish indicator since the most attentive voters are more likely to eventually vote.) Quinnipiac has routinely been asking Democrats how much attention they’re paying to the campaign and breaking out results on that basis. In the table to the left, you can see how that data looks in an average of their last three national polls, dating back to July.

Biden gets 30 percent of the vote among Democrats who say they’re paying “a lot” of attention to the campaign, essentially the same as the 29 percent support he has from Democrats overall in Quinnipiac’s polling. Warren and Kamala Harris do gain some ground among the most attentive voters — while Sanders loses some ground. But still, Biden tops the field among voters in that category.

If you look at polls of Iowa, though, you see more evidence of an actual enthusiasm deficit for Biden. Unfortunately, there are no especially recent polls of Iowa that asked the four-pronged favorability question of Democratic voters. But there are some from June and July that did, namely a Selzer & Co. poll for CNN and the Des Moines Register, a Change Research poll and a David Binder Research poll.3

… but there’s less enthusiasm for Biden in Iowa

Average favorability of Democratic primary candidates in Iowa polls

Favorable
Unfavorable


Candidate
Strongly
Somewhat
Total
Somewhat
Strongly
Total




Warren
46%
34%
80%
6%
4%
11%


Harris
40
33
73
6
4
10


Buttigieg
40
32
72
5
3
7


Sanders
32
37
68
15
9
24


Biden
31
36
67
16
8
24


Booker
22
42
63
10
3
13


Klobuchar
15
34
49
11
3
15


Castro
14
34
48
7
3
10


O’Rourke
12
40
52
13
6
19


Gillibrand
8
33
40
14
6
20


Gabbard
7
25
32
13
7
20


Delaney
5
20
25
13
7
20


Yang
5
18
23
14
6
19


Bullock
5
16
21
8
3
11


de Blasio
3
19
22
24
11
35


Bennet
3
16
19
9
3
12


Williamson
2
9
10
17
14
31


Ryan
2
14
16
13
5
18

Average of Iowa polls from Selzer & Co., Change Research and David Binder Research. Totals may not add up exactly due to rounding.

“Strongly” includes respondents who answered “very strongly”

Source: Polls

Biden’s numbers are OK in Iowa, but not great. Some 31 percent of Democrats say they have a very or strongly favorable view of him, which is essentially tied with Sanders for fourth place in the field. By comparison, 46 percent of Iowa Democrats have a strongly favorable view of Warren. (And remember, these polls are a couple of months old — she’s gained ground in most national and early-state polls since then.) Meanwhile, 40 percent also have a strongly favorable view of Harris and Pete Buttigieg.

Whenever we see a divergence between Iowa polls and national polls, the question is whether it has something to do with Iowa’s demographics or, rather, the fact that the campaign is more active in Iowa than it is nationally. If the differences are demographic in nature, then Biden might not have as much to worry about — the Democrats who turn out to caucus in Iowa are white and liberal, whereas he overperforms among nonwhite and moderate Democrats, who make up bigger parts of the electorate in states such as South Carolina and most of the Super Tuesday states. Alternatively, if Biden’s numbers are middling in Iowa because voters don’t like him as much upon prolonged exposure to him, that could mean it’s more of a canary in the coal mine, and that voters in other states will tire of Biden once they begin paying more attention to the campaign.

These explanations aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive — but on balance, the demographic hypothesis is more persuasive in Biden’s case. In 2016, 91 percent of Iowa’s Democratic caucus electorate was white, as compared to around 60 percent nationally in the Democratic primaries. And almost 70 percent of voters there identified as liberal, as compared to about 50 percent nationally. Those are big differences, and not ones that are favorable for Biden’s coalition, so it’s reasonable to expect he might be doing quite a bit worse there than he is nationally. Furthermore, as I mentioned, national polls show Biden doing just as well with highly attentive voters as with voters overall, which should also lead us to discount the canary-in-the-coal-mine hypothesis.

Actually, the candidate who should be really worried about his Iowa numbers is Sanders. Iowa’s demographics should boost his coalition, but his favorability numbers are just as lukewarm as Biden’s there.

But getting back to Biden: Even if his issues in Iowa are mostly linked to demographics, the state could still be a major concern for him. That’s because Iowa can affect the result of every state that votes after it. These effects seem to have dampened in recent election cycles. (Just ask Ted Cruz or Mike Huckabee — or, for that matter, Barack Obama — how much winning Iowa helped them in New Hampshire.) Nonetheless, to the extent that some of Biden’s support is predicated on electability, some of it could erode if voters see him take a big loss.

Biden may already be trailing in Iowa, in fact. Among the last seven polls there — everything since the first debate in Miami — three have shown Biden leads, but two have had Warren ahead, along with one Biden/Warren tie and one Buttigieg lead. If you combine those top-line polls with the enthusiasm numbers, plus Warren’s strong ground game in Iowa, you can argue that the state is Warren’s to lose more than Biden’s.

Still, the story is a lot more complicated than a cliched narrative about voters choosing heart (Warren/Sanders) over head (Biden), or voting for Biden only through gritted teeth. Biden has plenty of enthusiastic support. But he has less of it in Iowa, and that could be a big problem for him.

Voters Care About Biden’s Age — Not About His Gaffes

After a week’s worth of media focus on a series of gaffes and misstatements by former Vice President Joe Biden, Democratic voters are reacting by … apparently not giving much of a damn.

Granted, there hasn’t been a ton of polling this week. But what data we have looks just fine for Biden. His position in Morning Consult’s weekly tracking poll — first place with 33 percent of the vote — is unchanged. In HarrisX’s tracking poll for ScottRasmussen.com, he’s at 28 percent, which is up 3 percentage points from a week ago. He’s down 1 point in YouGov’s weekly poll, and he did get some middling numbers in New Hampshire this week. But Biden also got a good poll in South Carolina.

Not that you should necessarily have expected any differently. Biden has survived more serious problems — a rough first debate, a group of allegations about inappropriately touching women — only to see his numbers rebound from any decline (if they were even affected in the first place). So it probably would have been optimistic for Biden’s rivals to expect a handful of verbal gaffes to move his polls, especially given that Biden already came into the campaign with a reputation for being gaffe-prone.

Some influential Democrats are focusing on those gaffes for another reason, though: They see them as a sign of Biden’s advancing age. (Biden is 76 and would be 78 upon assuming the presidency.) Whether those Democrats are genuinely concerned about Biden’s age insofar as it might affect his performance against President Trump, or whether they’re using it as an excuse to promote the candidacies of younger Democrats who they happen to like better anyway, undoubtedly varies from case to case.

A lot of rank-and-file voters do have concerns about Biden’s age. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in February found that 62 percent of voters had reservations about voting for someone aged 75 or older. Other polls have also shown advanced age to be a concern among Democrats, Republicans and independents alike.

But there hasn’t been much discussion of age from the other candidates. Eric Swalwell brought it up explicitly in the first presidential debate, when he urged voters to “pass the torch to a new generation of Americans.” Rather than echo Swalwell’s argument, however, Kamala Harris tried to defuse the situation by suggesting that discussions of age and generational change were tantamount to schoolyard insults. “America does not want to witness a food fight, they want to know how we are going to put food on their table,” she said.

Maybe anti-Biden Democrats — and the other candidates — think they’re being coy by using Biden’s gaffes as a proxy for concerns about his age. No reason to get tarred with allegations of ageism, they figure, or to risk offending older voters who turn out in big numbers in the primaries. (Also, if the candidate they prefer to Biden is Bernie Sanders, they have the further problem that Sanders is a year older than Biden at 77.)1 Show rather than tell, as the maxim goes: Plant a few seeds and let voters build a narrative about Biden’s age on their own, without having to give them the hard sell.

This strategy might even work! It’s still fairly early, and Biden’s age is perhaps his biggest risk factor — bigger, in my view, than his policy positions, which are often more in line with the views of the average Democrat than those of the more liberal candidates.

But especially in the era of Trump — who, of course, has already begun to question Biden’s mental fitness — there might also be something to be said for saying the quiet part out loud. In a poll conducted shortly after the first debate, some Democratic voters explicitly used Swalwell’s “pass the torch” language when asked an open-ended question about why they didn’t want to vote for Biden. And they were much more likely to explicitly mention Biden’s age than to use vaguer responses, such as that he was “out of touch.”

There’s also risk to anti-Biden Democrats in drawing voters’ attention to gaffes or other incidents that voters view as relatively minor. Biden remains an extremely well-liked figure among Democratic voters; 75 percent of them have a favorable view of him, according to Morning Consult’s latest polling. So three-quarters of the electorate is going to start with a predilection against sympathizing with critiques of Biden. If those critiques aren’t really bringing the goods and instead seem like petty grievances, those Democrats may conclude that the case against Biden is a lot of hot air.

Related:

Meanwhile, if the false alarms continue — as in, Democrats on Twitter or on podcasts predict Biden’s demise and the polls are unmoved — the media may come to view Biden as a Trump-like “Teflon” candidate who isn’t greatly affected by gaffes and scandals. That could reduce their appetite for covering them in the future — even if more serious ones occur than what’s taken place to date.

Politics Podcast: How Much Does Iowa Matter?

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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This past weekend was all about Iowa. Candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary race gave speeches at the Iowa State Fair, and many of them also spent a good part of last week crisscrossing the state, laying out rural policy proposals. It was the most concentrated attention the first-in-the-nation caucus state has received so far this cycle, and that attention is likely going to ramp up as we get closer to the caucuses. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses just how important Iowa really is to winning a party’s nomination.

The team also takes a look at American voter opinions and the science of aging to address the question of whether someone can be too too old to be president. This comes after the press has scrutinized Joe Biden’s age in recent weeks as he’s made some major gaffes on the campaign trail.

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 Monday evenings, with additional episodes throughout the week. 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.

Forget ‘Lanes.’ The Democratic Primary Is A Whole Freaking Transit System.

If you’ve read our Slack chats or heard our podcast, you’ll know that I get annoyed whenever the discussion of “lanes” — such as the left/liberal lane versus the establishment/moderate lane — comes up in the context of the Democratic primary. Without getting too far into the weeds,1 I basically have two beefs with most of the analyses I see.

Beef Numero Uno: These analyses tend to treat voter preferences as being frozen in time — they’re about who the voter supports now, and perhaps who the voter currently lists as their second choice. But to the extent that lanes are interesting, it’s because they tell us something about the route a voter took in coming to a decision. A voter who backed Bernie Sanders in 2016 but has since switched to Elizabeth Warren won’t show up as a Sanders supporter if you ask about her current preferences, for instance. But the evolution of this voter’s choice of candidates would actually be evidence of the existence of a left/liberal policy lane.

Second, these analyses are usually oriented around an effort to either prove or debunk the existence of a particular type of lane, usually the liberal or moderate lanes. But voters come around to their decisions for lots of different reasons. Some voters do vote on the basis of ideology or policy. Some vote on demographics or identity. Some factor in more abstract considerations like “leadership” or “electability.” And some just haven’t thought deeply about their choices yet. When candidates are aligned along several different dimensions — for instance, Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke have much in common in terms of their demographics and their policy platforms — you can see especially strong correlations in which voters support them, with one tending to rise or fall at the other’s expense. But most of the time, it’s messier, with different threads pulling in different directions.

To extend the lanes metaphor, you wouldn’t expect to see a single, parallel set of lanes connecting all voters in the Democratic primary. Instead, you’d expect something more like a complex, multi-modal transportation network, where some parts of the network are more robust than others, but there are a lot of somewhat redundant options. This doesn’t mean that paths between different candidates are irrational or random, any more than the choices of, say, Manhattan commuters are. But they might look chaotic in the aggregate if you don’t recognize that different voters have different priorities and take different routes to get there.

Let’s think about voters who supported Sanders in 2016, for instance, and which candidates they might be supporting now if they aren’t sticking with Bernie. Voters four years ago might have had several reasons to prefer Sanders to Hillary Clinton:

Some voters — such as those who do choose candidates on the basis of ideology — liked Sanders because he was proud to wave the flag for democratic socialism. These voters would probably be inclined to back Warren, if they aren’t staying with Sanders.
Some voters liked Sanders because he was an anti-establishment outsider. I’m not sure where these voters would go today. They certainly wouldn’t be inclined to go to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, who have the most support from the party establishment. But they might also see Warren as too establishment-friendly. Maybe more eccentric candidates like Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang would work for this group. But I’d expect a lot of anti-establishment types to stick with Sanders. In fact, that seems to describe a lot of the voters he’s currently left with. If you look at donations, for example, a lot of Sanders donors don’t seem to be interested in donating to any of the other candidates, suggesting that he’s somewhat of an island unto himself.
Some voters liked Sanders because he is a white man. I’m not saying this is an especially large group of voters. But there are certainly some, and maybe quite a few. They have lots of other white guys to choose from if they want to move on from Sanders: Biden, O’Rourke, Buttigieg and so forth.
Relatedly, voters who associated Sanders with the white working class and supported him on that basis, or who believe that a candidate who does well with white working-class voters is more “electable,” might be attracted to Biden this time around, in addition to Sanders.
Some younger voters liked Sanders because of his emphasis on policies like free college tuition, and because he came to unexpectedly represent a break from the hegemony of Baby Boomer-dominated politics. It’s not totally clear who these young voters are supporting yet — they can be hard to pin down in polls, and they can sometimes be late to engage in the process. But Buttigieg, Yang and O’Rourke have the potential to overperform with young voters relative to the electorate overall.
Finally, some voters just aren’t tuned in yet. The notion that Sanders and Biden’s support is just name recognition is , in my view. But it’s certainly true for some voters. These voters’ preferences may simply reflect who they’ve been hearing about in the news lately, which recently has meant Biden, Warren and Harris in addition to Sanders.

So if you run through this list, you certainly do see some major highways that connect Sanders and Warren. But there are also a lot of ways to get from Sanders to Biden. And there are some byways that link Sanders to several of the second-tier or minor candidates, most notably Gabbard, Buttigieg, Yang and O’Rourke. The one major candidate who doesn’t have a lot of obvious connections with Sanders is probably Harris. It’s sort of like trying to get from the West Village to the Upper East Side. You can certainly do it, and they aren’t that far apart as the crow flies, but it requires an extra transfer or two.

All of that might sound good in theory, but is there any data on who Sanders’s 2016 voters are supporting now? Actually, yes! Emerson College, in its national polls, has broken out results based on who Democrats said they supported four years ago. Since the sample sizes are a bit small, I combined the last two Emerson national polls, which were conducted in early and late July, respectively.

Who Sanders and Clinton voters from 2016 support now

Combined results from a July 6-8 and a July 27-29 national poll

Current pick for respondents who supported …


Candidate
Clinton in 2016
Sanders in 2016




Bernie Sanders
9%
31%


Joe Biden
43
19


Elizabeth Warren
15
13


Kamala Harris
18
10


Pete Buttigieg
4
6


Andrew Yang
0
5


Beto O’Rourke
2
4


Tulsi Gabbard
0
3


Cory Booker
1
1


Others
7
8

Source: EMERSON COLLEGE

This data actually does a good job reflecting our “predictions” from above about how Sanders’s support from 2016 might map to the various candidates this year. (Granted, it’s easy to make “predictions” when you get to see the data before making them, as I did in this case.) Start with some of the lesser-known candidates. Gabbard and Yang might not have that many supporters, but the ones they do have are drawn disportionately from former Sanders voters. O’Rourke and Buttigieg also do better with former Sanders voters than with ex-Clinton ones.

Among the major candidates, there are quite a few Sanders 2016 –> Biden 2020 voters, although not nearly as many as there are Clinton 2016 –> Biden 2020 voters. Harris gets her support mostly from Clinton voters; relatively little comes from 2016 Sanders voters, consistent with our hypothesis.

Warren is, by contrast, drawing about equal shares of Clinton 2016 and Sanders 2016 voters. Maybe you’re surprised that Warren’s numbers aren’t more slanted to former Sanders supporters, but keep in mind that (i) there are plenty of connections between Clinton and Warren too, e.g. in their appeal to college-educated women; (ii) whereas Clinton’s voters need to look around for a new candidate, Sanders 2016 voters have the option of picking Sanders again. One way to look at it is that 44 percent of Sanders 2016 voters are voting for either Sanders or Warren this time around, while just 24 percent of Clinton 2016 voters are.

So there almost certainly is a robust left policy/ideology lane in the Democratic primary. It’s probably even one of the more well-traveled routes. It’s just far from the only road in town.

Polls Since The Second Debate Show Kamala Harris Slipping

Polls since last week’s Democratic debate haven’t shown the sort of dramatic swings that we saw after Round 1 — but they do show some shifts. In particular, they show further downward movement for Kamala Harris, who had already lost much of her bounce following the first debate.

So far, there have been five national polls conducted entirely after the debate that allow for a direct comparison to an earlier poll by the same pollster. These are the polls from Quinnipiac University, Ipsos, Morning Consult,1 YouGov and HarrisX.2 Because I’m feeling a little fancy — and because these polls are something of a mixed bag in terms of sample size and quality — I weighted the polls based on sample size and the pollster’s rating, as we do for our Trump approval tracker and in our election models. Here is the before-and-after comparison for each candidate between the post-debate polls and the most recent pre-debate polls from the same polling firms.

Harris is biggest decliner after second set of debates

Weighted average of five post-debate polls, with comparison to pre-debate polls by the same pollster

Weighted average of polls



Candidate
Before Debate
After Debate
Change




Biden
30.2%
28.4%
-1.9

–



Sanders
15.3
17.1
1.8

–



Warren
13.0
14.6
1.6

–



Harris
10.7
7.9
-2.8

–



Buttigieg
4.7
5.4
0.7

–



O’Rourke
2.8
2.6
-0.2

–



Booker
1.7
2.5
0.8

–



Yang
1.9
1.6
-0.3

–



Gabbard
0.8
1.3
0.5

–



Castro
1.1
1.2
0.1

–



Klobuchar
1.0
0.9
-0.1

–



Gillibrand
0.7
0.7
0.0



de Blasio
0.6
0.5
-0.1

–



Ryan
0.7
0.5
-0.2

–



Williamson
0.5
0.5
0.0



Bullock
0.3
0.4
0.1

–



Delaney
0.6
0.4
-0.2

–



Bennet
0.5
0.3
-0.2

–



Hickenlooper
0.3
0.2
-0.1

–



Inslee
0.0
0.1
0.1

–

Polls included in the weighted average are Quinnipiac (weight 1.40), Ipsos (1.49), Morning Consult (2.13), HarrisX (1.16) and YouGov (0.94). Only candidates who participated in the debates are listed in the table.

Harris was in the single digits in all five post-debate polls and was off by nearly 3 percentage points on average as compared with the pre-debate polls. Earlier this week, I discussed how Harris seems to be stuck in between Joe Biden, on the one hand, and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on her other, more-left leaning hand. And that’s starting to show up in the numbers. If you look at the Quinnipiac poll, for instance, there’s no single group of Democrats — say, wealthy or young or black Democrats — among whom Harris is polling at any higher than 10 percent, whereas Biden, Warren and Sanders all have fairly distinctive bases.

Meanwhile, Biden has fallen by almost 2 points in the post-debate polls. It’s not clear that this is necessarily because of his debate performance; according to YouGov polling for HuffPost, there were slightly more Democrats who said the debate improved their views of Biden than those who said it worsened them. But the debates can serve to showcase other Democrats’ talents, a process from which the well-known Biden stands more to lose than to gain. Keep in mind, though, that Biden recovered almost entirely from what was a much bigger polling slump after the first debate.

New HuffPost/YouGov poll on the second debates: Elizabeth Warren had another very good night. https://t.co/uKNroKIBt9

(Now the question is: will that help her to strengthen her standing in the primary, either temporarily or in the long term?) pic.twitter.com/YvyGLy2ADu

— Ariel Edwards-Levy (@aedwardslevy) August 5, 2019

Warren and Sanders have also gained a point or two since the debate. In Warren’s case, the movement is part of a slow-and-steady climb upward, although the debates do seem to at least partially account for that forward movement, as there were far more voters who said last week’s debate improved their impressions of Warren than those who said it worsened them.

For other candidates, polling movement can be hard to come by. Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker both got positive marks from voters for their debate performances, but they gained only a percentage point or so in the topline numbers.

And other candidates that various media outlets (including us here at FiveThirtyEight!) claimed performed well in the debates, such as Steve Bullock, John Delaney and Marianne Williamson, didn’t see their numbers move at all, whether because voters actually disliked how they debated (as they clearly did in the case of Delaney) or just prefer other options.

After the debates, I issued a set of my periodically updating, not-to-be-taken-too-seriously nomination tiers, which reflect my subjective impression of the candidates’ relative likelihood of winning the nomination (i.e. there’s no statistical model behind these). But that was based on a lot of educated guessing of how voters would react to the debates. Now that we have actual data in hand, a few further tweaks are in order.

Nate’s not-to-be-taken-too-seriously presidential tiers

For the Democratic nomination, as revised on Aug. 8, 2019

Tier
Sub-tier
Candidates




1
a
Biden



b
Warren



c
Harris ↓, Sanders ↑


2

Buttigieg, Booker


3
a
O’Rourke ↑, Klobuchar, Castro



b
Yang


4
a
Inslee, Gillibrand, Gabbard



b
Everyone else

Note: Steve Bullock was demoted into the “everyone else” tier.

I said last week that I was on the verge of moving Sanders back into Tier 1, and I’m going to go ahead and do that. I still have lots of concerns about his chances, most notably that the data suggests that he potentially has a high floor but a low ceiling. But I also have a lot of concerns about Harris, who I’ve demoted into Tier 1c — and who has fallen to a pretty clear fourth place in the polls.

In fact, other than Biden (who can win just by holding on to his current support, more or less) and Warren (who has the most upward momentum), none of the candidates has a particularly compelling theory of the case right now. Sanders’s is something like: Hope voters get tired of Biden; hope Warren stalls out, perhaps because she’s competing with too many other candidates for white, college-educated voters; win a couple of the early states with, say, 25 percent of the vote, and then hope the party rallies around you. There’s a lot of hoping in there — but every candidate faces uphill odds in such a large field, and at least Sanders has a distinctive brand and a decent-sized, fairly enthusiastic base.

I’m also slightly moving up Beto O’Rourke, which comes after a long series of downgrades for the Texan. Partly I just think I’d been overreacting before in demoting him below the likes of Amy Klobuchar and Julián Castro, both of whom O’Rourke polls slightly better than. But he’s also been forceful in responding to President Trump — and to the media — after the El Paso and Dayton shootings, and gun control is a high-priority issue for Democrats.

Finally, Bullock gets demoted into the “everyone else” part of Tier 4. He’s quite unlikely to make the third set of debates next month, and Biden seems to have monopolized the market for Democrats who are looking for a moderate white guy.

Will The El Paso Shooting Change How Politicians Talk About White Extremism?

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

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Over the weekend at least 31 people were killed in mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. In the Texas shooting, the gunman’s attack appears to have been motivated by his white supremacist beliefs; the 21-year-old white man allegedly wrote that his attack was in response to the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” echoing language that President Trump has used to talk about immigrants. (So far, there’s no indication of a similar motive in the Ohio shooting.)

On Monday, Trump addressed the attacks, saying “our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.” But many people believe Trump helped fuel the Texas shooter, and this isn’t the first time his rhetoric has been criticized for sparking violence. Some 2020 presidential candidates, like Beto O’Rourke, squarely place the blame for what happened in El Paso at the feet of the president. At the same time, many Democrats have called for increased restrictions on gun ownership in the U.S. — an issue that seems unlikely to get passed by this Congress.

So how will what happened in El Paso affect the conversation around gun laws — and immigration — in 2020? And what does this mean for the growing problem of violent white extremism in the U.S.?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): Well, we can probably expect a spike in support for stricter gun laws. Previous mass shootings, like Parkland, have certainly had that effect.

Although those spikes do tend to fade after a few weeks — probably because the shootings fade from the headlines. That said, overall support for gun regulations has increased this decade.

And we might even be starting to see the dam of gridlocked legislative action break as a result. After the Parkland shooting, for instance, Florida’s all-Republican government passed some moderate gun-control laws.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): That’s right. There is a cumulative effect even if there’s also a short-term boom-and-bust cycle after significant events. During the midterm elections, for instance, more Democrats than Republicans rated gun policy as a high-priority issue, which is a departure from the old-school conventional wisdom that guns were supposed to rally Republican voters.

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): It’ll be interesting, too, to see how much of the conversation going forward is about gun control and how much is about the issue of combating white nationalist extremism and terrorism.

The two are related insofar as white nationalist attacks like the one in El Paso are committed using guns, but the El Paso attack also highlighted just how common deadly white nationalist extremist attacks are becoming and how the government seems pretty ill-equipped to respond — separate from broader conversations on stricter gun laws.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): One thing I think might happen is that even some anti-gun-control Republicans will stop describing illegal immigration from Mexico as an “invasion,” which is language the alleged shooter reportedly used to describe the motivations for his attack.

But even though some Republicans — maybe even Trump, I’m not sure — will probably dial down the white nationalist rhetoric, I think the only movement on gun control will happen on the left. Or Democrats will become even more unabashedly party of gun control.

natesilver: Do any of the Democratic candidates have really aggressive policies on guns, e.g. a proposal to ban handguns? It seems like there actually isn’t that much daylight between the various Democrats on policy solutions, so it’s mostly a matter of how much they emphasize guns versus other issues. And how much they are willing to talk about race versus other issues.

perry: Cory Booker has a proposal to require a license to own a gun that I am not sure Joe Biden would endorse (since Biden is running as the person who can appeal to more conservative voters). But generally most Democrats support: 1) expanding background checks, 2) banning assault weapons, and 3) ban high-capacity magazines.

nrakich: And these proposals are overwhelmingly popular not just with Democrats, but the public as a whole, too.

ameliatd: And also fairly effective! At least according to this round-up of experts from 2017.

nrakich: But given how far left (and into unpopular general-election territory) Democrats have gone on some other issues, like decriminalizing border crossings, I guess it’s somewhat surprising that no one has gone further left on guns? But we still have several months to go.

perry: In reaction to the shooting in El Paso, I think the Democratic candidates are going to speak more openly about racism. O’Rourke in particular is really speaking bluntly about how Trump has fomented white nationalism in a way that I expect other candidates will mirror.

sarahf: So something we’re all touching on here is that this conversation isn’t just going to be about increased calls for stricter gun laws. It’s also going to be about how the president’s rhetoric may be driving some of the violence we’re seeing, especially as it pertains to intolerance regarding immigrants in the U.S.

Is that fair?

ameliatd: I think that’s fair, Sarah. After other mass shootings, it’s been easier for the public and politicians to seize on lots of different explanations (and make lots of different arguments about how to respond) because the shooter’s motive wasn’t clear. Here, the link to white supremacy was so obvious that Trump condemned it as such, although he didn’t do it in a way that addressed his own inflammatory rhetoric. But it does mean that the conversation may end up focusing on race and Trump’s rhetoric rather than gun control.

natesilver: And you already had several of the Democratic candidates happy to call the president a racist. In fact, it’s arguably a pretty core part of the strategy for Democrats who are running on liberal identity politics, for lack of a better term, or who are saying Trump is a historic evil or anomaly who must be stopped.

nrakich: Agreed, Amelia. And I think both those issues play well for Democrats politically in places like the suburbs, where they hope to build on 2018 gains in 2020.

Although swing voters may feel that some racial-justice issues, like reparations, go too far, I still think that many can get behind condemning racist and violence-inciting rhetoric.

Even some of Trump supporters say they wish he would tweet less!

ameliatd: Not to mention, a majority of Americans already think Trump encourages white supremacists.

perry: This gets into the whole debate about how Democrats won in 2018 and how they should run in 2020. Broadly speaking, there is a bloc of Democrats who thinks 2018 was won on health care and that the party should continue to focus on populist issues and avoid talking too much talk about Trump’s comments, which they think would focus the debate on the country’s growing racial diversity and drive away some white voters. And then there is the bloc who thinks we are already in a national debate about race and identity because of Trump and there is no way to sidestep that.

Both camps have valid arguments, and there are obviously ways to both run an anti-racist and populist campaign, but I also think this incident increases the salience of racial issues.

nrakich: Right, Perry, but I think there are safer ways to run on race (e.g., condemning white supremacy) and riskier ways (e.g., calling for reparations).

Nor is decrying racist rhetoric mutually exclusive with talking about issues like health care.

Voters are smart enough to vote on multiple things at once, and since health care is a policy question and rhetoric is a question of tone, I think they’re especially non-mutually-exclusive.

natesilver: It’s not the conversation that, say, Pete Buttigieg wants to be having, though. Or Bernie Sanders. Or Elizabeth Warren.

sarahf: And why is that? Is it because it risks politicizing the topic of gun violence in the U.S. even more?

natesilver: Maybe they’re in different categories. But I think Buttigieg has had trouble relating to voters of color, for all sorts of reasons. For Warren and Sanders, they’re running on a platform of economic change — or “economic justice,” if you prefer — which of course is correlated in lots of ways with racial justice, but that’s nonetheless a real point of debate in Democratic circles, and maybe one they’d rather avoid.

sarahf: So as Amelia mentioned earlier, what sets this shooting apart from some other (although not all) mass shootings is its link to white extremist ideology. And so I wonder what impact that will have on public opinion moving forward, including how Americans think about aspects of Trump’s rhetoric.

ameliatd: It’s really hard to draw a direct line between a politician’s rhetoric and a particular act of violence. But I’m working on a story looking at the research on this topic, and pretty much all of the social scientists I’ve spoken with agree that hostile political rhetoric, particularly from someone as influential as a president, can embolden people who already had prejudiced views or were prone to violence.

perry: This is really a conversation about Trump, right?

The general public is against white supremacist language and against mass shootings. So the core question is whether Trump will stop invoking the ideas expressed by the shooter in El Paso, and whether he can reframe his rhetoric and approach to make it clear he is against increased immigration, and not Latinos and nonwhite people in the U.S.

natesilver: Yeah, it’s a conversation about Trump. I feel like people are beating around the bush too much. It’s a conversation about Trump.

sarahf: That’s fair, but it’s more than Trump, too. It’s also some of the commentary on Fox News and in right-wing conspiracy theories. Granted, Trump has had a role in bringing these ideas into the mainstream, but I’d say the problem is bigger than him, too.

perry: But we had a person kill a lot of people while invoking language that the president and his team have regularly used. I don’t think that most Americans view the country as facing an “invasion” of immigrants. Or that most Americans approve of Trump’s language. Other Republicans, like Mitch McConnell, are not talking about immigrant invasions all the time.

So my big questions are: “Will Trump stop invoking these ideas?” and “Will the Republican Party push him to stop?” I think the answer to both these questions is maybe.

Do others agree?

sarahf: I don’t know. Right now there seems to be more of a distancing from the language Trump and his team has used more than a rebuke. Trump’s acting White House chief of staff, for instance, told ABC News that he doesn’t think it’s fair to blame Trump and that the problem predates his administration.

ameliatd: Right, the answer so far seems to be that these shootings haven’t yet convinced Trump’s allies to start condemning his language.

natesilver: Not to be too both-sides-y, but let’s not forget the 2017 Congressional baseball shooting in this discussion where a gunman targeted Republican legislators. So, yes, maybe we have a rising tide of political violence overall, of which Trump’s rhetoric plays an important part, but it’s not necessarily the only cause.

perry: But if the White House is emphasizing that it’s opposed to white supremacy Trump may have to stop saying things white nationalists say.

Trump’s re-election campaign has already put out more than 2,000 Facebook ads that include the word “invasion” this year as part of his message on immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to an analysis by The New York Times. So did Saturday end that? I think the answer might be yes. I’m not sure, but that could be at least one potential shift.

natesilver: Do we really expect Trump to back down though? He seems to be convinced that this stuff is central to his re-election efforts. And he’s not the sort of guy who stops doing something just because people tell him to stop doing it.

ameliatd: I also think the fact that he’s being attacked as racist by many of the Democratic candidates could make him dig in even further.

nrakich: The White House also condemned white supremacy after Charlottesville, but of course, Trump later returned to his inflammatory rhetoric.

perry: I think this shooting is different than Charlottesville, though. Or anything else that has happened. People were literally killed by someone who invoked the same language as the president.

I don’t want to suggest something is a game-changer, but I think this is potentially an important moment. Because even if, say, Trump does not change, maybe the Republican Party shifts in some way?

nrakich: A woman died in Charlottesville, too.

I am just skeptical of any claims that “this time it’s different.”

The “invasion” language may disappear in the short term because it will be seen as too inflammatory for the next couple months. But I don’t think there will be any kind of permanent shift.

perry: That’s a reasonable position, and probably the right one.

But if Trump stops describing what’s happening at the southern border as an “invasion,” that would be significant. Words, in my view, do matter.

And that “invasion” framing is really racist.

What I’m really trying to isolate here is that a person killed people using the same words the president has used to stoke fears about immigrants in the U.S.

Does that make what happened in El Paso different than what happened in Charlottesville? “No” is probably the right answer. But I’m not sure.

nrakich: Also, this isn’t the first time during the Trump administration that a gun was used to murder multiple people as part of a hate crime — the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting targeted Jews, for example.

ameliatd: I do think the lack of condemnation from Republicans is significant. When the response is distancing, not censure, that sends a signal to Trump. But I do think you’re right, Perry, that this is an important moment for Trump and the GOP.

sarahf: The gunman also allegedly wrote that his views “predate Trump,” perhaps in anticipation of the blowback. And given that more Republicans haven’t spoken out, I’m not sure how this will change the conversation around gun violence or the fact that Trump’s rhetoric can inspire violence, other than maybe Republicans and Democrats further retreat into their partisan camps.

perry: I don’t think that Americans’ views on gun will change much, in part because most Americans, even a significant bloc of Republicans, already favor a lot of gun control measures. Americans overall are also supportive of immigration and on average are growing less prejudiced since Trump’s election (not more), so I think incidents like the El Paso shooting are likely to further those those trends — not reverse them.

And so I think we’re likely to see more polls showing that certain kinds of racial rhetoric should be out of bounds. For instance, Trump telling female congresswomen of color to “go back” to their countries was very unpopular (although a majority of Republicans said that the attacks were acceptable).

natesilver: The gun control discussion is also REALLY complicated by the fact that Wyoming has as many senators as California. The Senate has big, built-in bias toward rural states, and few issues have a stronger urban-rural divide than guns do.

ameliatd: It’s at least possible that we’ll see some more movement on something like red-flag laws, though, right? These are laws that would help temporarily take guns away from people who are at a high risk of violence, and that have passed in a significant number of states since the Parkland shooting last year. And they seem to be getting some support from Republicans in Congress.

nrakich: The (Republican) governor of Ohio proposed one on Tuesday.

ameliatd: And that’s a policy that the NRA has supported in the abstract — although they’ve also worked to water them down when they’ve actually been introduced.

natesilver: There is some bipartisan support for those kinds of laws. But does it have McConnell’s support? I’d defer to Perry on all things McConnell, but it does seem as if McConnell isn’t the kind of guy who wants to give any victory to gun control advocates, even a small one.

perry: I think the gun policy debate is basically intractable for now. Republicans control the Senate, the presidency and a lot of state governments, and they are not moving on that issue — even if the public becomes even more pro-gun control.

sarahf: So if the debate on gun policy is intractable, like Perry says, where do you see the conversation on Americans’ tolerance for racist rhetoric headed?

perry: I think this racist rhetoric from Trump, Fox News and other parts of the Republican Party can change. And I think it will. Will Trump say racist things in the future? Of course. But I think the worst of it, i.e. the “invasion” rhetoric and telling members of Congress to go back to their countries, might die down.

I’m also not totally convinced that Trump is confident that his racial rhetoric makes great politics. So I think he might try harder to figure out how to speak and act in ways that are critical of immigration but also don’t seem targeted at people of color.

ameliatd: I agree that the conversation about Trump’s rhetoric has more staying power — both because it’s so inflammatory and racist and because it’s connected to his broader anti-immigrant posture. You can’t definitively say that Trump’s language is directly sparking violence, but I do think people intuitively understand that when a president talks this way, it brings radical, fringe-y voices into the mainstream and normalizes them. I guess I’m just not convinced he’s going to tone down his language.

nrakich: I think the answer is “at the margin”? Maybe we see a couple more minor gun laws, maybe a pause in racist rhetoric. But overall, I don’t think the big picture will change very much.

Politics Podcast: Can Trump’s Words Incite Violence?

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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This installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast deals with two mass shootings this weekend, one of which was explicitly tied to white nationalist terrorism. On Saturday, a young white man targeted immigrants and killed at least 20 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. And on Sunday, at least nine people were killed in Dayton, Ohio, in a shooting where the motive is still unknown. The podcast crew discusses trends in mass shootings and white nationalism and checks in on how politicians are responding.

The team also takes stock of the recent rash of Republican congressional retirements, and finally, the crew looks at the post-debate Democratic primary polling to see if anything has really changed in the race.

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 Monday evenings, with additional episodes throughout the week. 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.