A few months ago, I argued that it was pretty pointless to try and handicap the Democratic field without knowing Joe Biden’s intentions. Now that the former vice president has entered the race and surged in the polls, what can we say about the state of the race?
One way to approach this is to look at what’s happened to the leading rival campaigns following the Biden announcement. To do this I looked at the RealClearPolitics polling average for the top six Democratic candidates, directly before Biden’s announcement and today. Once you go beyond those candidates and get into the low single digits, it’s difficult to detect any sort of movement.
In a 20-plus candidate field, Joe Biden’s 39% average is higher than Donald Trump’s was until the GOP field had winnowed to three candidates in 2016. Biden has now polled at over 40 points in several recent polls, meaning his average is poised to rise as newer polls get cycled. But even as it stands now, it’s impressive in a field of over 20 candidates. By comparison, Trump ran in a 17-person GOP field and surged to the lead in the polls in July 2015 within a few weeks of entering the race. But it took a long time for him to get to where Biden is currently polling. In fact, it wasn’t until March 20 that he reached an average of 40% after winning 21 contests, including Florida, which drove Sen. Marco Rubio out of the race. By that point, it was just Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz, and John Kasich. Now that Biden has created distance, his rivals have to consider whether to all join together and aim fire at him, or whether they attack each other to arise as the leading alternative to Biden. It’s quite early, but Biden is starting from a strong position and has proved himself resilient in the face of attacks on his ideology and history of inappropriate touching.
Bernie Sanders is crashing. The most clearly observable effect of Biden’s entry into the race is that it’s been accompanied by a precipitous fall in Sanders’ support, from an average of 23% (about 6 points away from Biden) to an average of 15.5% (or nearly 24 points behind). A few weeks ago, he was being described as almost a co-leader, and now he’s a distant second and closer to the rest of the pack than he is to Biden. He faces a difficult road, trapped between Biden and a pack of rivals who have also staked a claim to many of the policies that made him famous.
Elizabeth Warren may be edging out Kamala Harris. It’s hard to know how much to attribute this to Biden or to other factors, such as Warren rolling out a number of policy proposals that have gotten good reviews from liberals, or Beto O’Rourke’s fall (more on that later). But recent polls have indicated that Warren, while not exactly surging, seems to have closed the gap and inched ahead of Harris. Harris at one point had been as high as 12.3% after a successful launch. But Warren has managed to mainly hold steady and seems to be recovering from a short decline in the wake of O’Rourke’s entry into the race. Right now, Warren is at 7.7% and Harris is at 7.2%, a barely discernible difference, but one that seems notable given that for awhile Harris was being treated in media coverage as the clearly stronger candidate. And maybe she will ultimately justify that coverage. But for now, it’s Warren that seemingly is more on the upswing.
Beto O’Rourke is bombing, and Pete Buttigieg may be plateauing. After he set what had to be a record for adoring national profiles of a losing Senate candidate in 2018, O’Rourke immediately disrupted the Democratic race when he entered it. But he hasn’t withstood his first round of tougher scrutiny. After having peaked at 9.5% last month, he’s now down to 4.3%. With his initial sheen having worn off, it’s difficult to see how he recaptures it. We’ll need to see more polling before declaring the Buttigieg boomlet over, but it’s at least safe to say he has hit a level of resistance. After the South Bend mayor came out of nowhere in polling to soar to 8.4%, he’s started to come back to Earth, and lower numbers in recent polls have dragged his average down to 6.8%.
To be clear, this is an assessment of the race at this point in time, not a prediction of how things will look a year from now.
