DES MOINES, Iowa — The Iowa polls are all over the place.
Looking only at the six nonpartisan polls conducted since the Iowa debate on Jan. 14, we see everything from a massive Bernie Sanders lead to a very big Joe Biden lead. We see Elizabeth Warren in a close 2nd place and a sad 4th place. Pete Buttigieg is somewhere between 2nd place and 5th place. Amy Klobuchar is somewhere from 3rd place to 5th place.
Just consider the difference from each candidate’s worst post-debate poll to each candidate’s best.
Sanders: 19% to 30%
Biden: 17% to 25%
Buttigieg: 10% to 22%
Warren: 11% to 19%
Klobuchar: 7% to 10%
These are massive variances, and there aren’t really clear trends. You can kind of say Buttigieg is trending downwards (his three best polls are the three oldest ones), and you can kind of say Klobuchar is trending upwards (her three worst polls are the three oldest).
Above is one way of looking at the range for each candidate. It suggests an order that looks like this: Sanders, Biden, Buttigieg, Warren, and Klobuchar. That’s the order if you rank them by their highest result and their mean result. If you flip Warren and Buttigieg, it’s also the order of their lowest result.
We’ll get more polls very soon, but the only thing that’s (fairly) safe to guess is that the two old guys, Bernie and Biden, will top the results in the first ballot at least.
