“No candidate received a polling bump as a result of the Detroit debates,” writes Morning Consult analyst Anthony Patterson this week. That’s a big disappointment for the dozen or more candidates struggling to make the Democrats’ 2% cutoffs for further debate appearances, as well as for the pundits weary after six hours or so of debates and post-debate interviews.
Actually, it appears that Kamala Harris sunk a bit from the numbers she got after after her busing hit on Joe Biden in the Miami debate. And Elizabeth Warren’s post-Detroit numbers are up a bit. In the most recent national polls, Biden is still in first place, Bernie Sanders and Warren are competitive for second, Harris follows in high single digits, and Pete Buttigieg trails behind.
What may be more interesting is how the polling differs from previous patterns. In 2016 primaries, white non-college graduates in communities with low social connectedness thronged to Donald Trump, while college graduates shunned him. That was a new pattern, I wrote in a March 2016 Washington Examiner column, and one predictive of how Trump switched 100 electoral votes and won the presidency that November.
So let’s look at how different segments of Democratic primary voters are responding to candidates this year.
Start with white college graduates, once a negligible splinter of the electorate, but now about 40% of voters in 2016, according to exit polls. They’re also the Democrats’ left-most voters on issues, from impeachment to racial reparations. A post-Detroit Quinnipiac poll with subgroup results shows Warren leading Biden, 28% to 25% in this group, well ahead of Sanders (11%). Harris, at 8%, is roughly tied with Buttigieg. White college grads are among the best groups for the articulate former Harvard Law professor and the articulate Notre Dame professor’s son.
Black voters, solidly Democratic for a half-century, are about 25% of Democratic primary voters. MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki’s useful summary of their primary voting history shows how they’re voted near-unanimously or heavily for one candidate—Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton since. Note that each of these since Jackson has won the party’s nomination. Big margins among one-quarter of an electorate can overcome small margins among the other three-quarters.
Black Democrats’ clear choice now is Biden (47% in Quinnipiac), with Sanders (11%) a very distant second. Warren, the white college grads’ favorite, lags behind with blacks at 8%. Quinnipiac has black candidates Harris and Booker receiving 1% and 0% from blacks – they do better in other polls, but always struggle to hit double digits.
Their left-wing issue stances may not help; Echelon Insights polling shows that fewer black Democrats identify as liberal than their white counterparts (by 13 points). That suggests most blacks may not switch to the stridently liberal Booker or the flexibly liberal Harris, as black voters in early 2008 switched to Barack Obama after he showed he could win the Iowa caucuses.
Some Democratic constituencies seem to have an active aversion to certain candidates. Black voters seem especially repelled by Buttigieg – he gets only 1% from them in Quinnipiac and he has been getting 0% in other polls. One possible reason is that black voters have been the Democratic constituency least supportive of same-sex marriage.
And very high-income voters, heavily Democratic these days, nonetheless seem to have little use for Bernie Sanders. Among high-income ($100,000+) Democrats in Quinnipiac, only 6% chose the socialist and admirer of 70% income tax rates. Similarly, Sanders lost the highest-income suburbs in 2016 – Greenwich, Winnetka, Wellesley, Bloomfield Hills – to Hillary Clinton, roughly two-to-one.
Campaign finance reports show several candidates with home-state fundraising bases, but surprisingly few with strong home state polling. Californians cast 17% of Democratic primary voters last time, but the RealClearPolitics.com average of recent (June/July) California polls shows Kamala Harris, winner of three California statewide elections, with just 20%.
Even more woeful are the hometown showings by the three candidates from metropolitan New York, though that state and New Jersey account for 9% of Democratic primary votes. Few are backing Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand or Bill de Blasio. As for Massachusetts, RCP has Elizabeth Warren in third place there, at 12%. In next-door New Hampshire, she is in second with 17%.
So will relatively moderate blacks (a majority in South Carolina) stick with Barack Obama’s vice president? Will white college grads (dominant in New Hampshire) coalesce around someone with a radical platform? Or will the dwindling and less radical white non-college group (still big in Iowa) take over? We’ll have answers in 18 months.
