Beto O’Rourke’s recent surge in polls says less about his chances in the 2020 presidential race than it does about how weak many other likely Democratic contenders are as the campaign enters its preliminary stages.
Coming off of his loss to Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas, O’Rourke, the media favorite, shot up in recent surveys of the 2020 race. A national CNN poll put him in third place with the support of 9 percent of Democrats. Though he trailed former Vice President Joe Biden (30 percent) and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., (14 percent), who both benefit from high name recognition, he was ahead of Democrats who have been rumored as potential candidates for the past few years: Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Harris, who was at 9 percent in October, saw her support drop to 4 percent; Warren dropped from 8 percent to 3 percent.
An Iowa-specific poll sponsored by the Des Moines Register and CNN found a similar result: Biden at 32 percent, Sanders at 19 percent, O’Rourke in third place with 11 percent, and the rest of the candidates in the single digits.
O’Rourke, an outgoing House member coming off a defeat, has very shaky fundamentals as a presidential candidate, as I outlined last week. But what his rise does show is how wide-open the Democratic field really is.
After Biden and Sanders, both in their late 70s with many vulnerabilities, there is a huge drop-off, with lots of candidates bunched together. The fact that O’Rourke, without doing much, could leapfrog all of the other candidates who had been clearly positioning themselves to run for years, suggests that none of the Democratic candidates enter the race in a particularly strong position. It’s especially interesting to see Warren fall so low, given that in 2016 she was initially seen as the greatest threat to Hillary Clinton were she to run.
Of course, somebody is eventually going to emerge as the Democratic nominee, and whoever the nominee is will have a good chance of defeating President Trump. So there’s a decent chance that somebody currently polling in the single digits will end up as our next commander in chief. But there’s no particular reason to view anybody as a clear front-runner.
