The 2020 Democratic primary is here—and not in an airy, metaphorical way. California Sen. Kamala Harris is talking over options and will decide on a run during the holidays. Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has ruled out a run, as has Michael Avenatti. And Beto O’Rourke has, in a shocking turn of events that nobody could have foreseen, said he is no longer ruling out a presidential run and has met with Barack Obama.
The beginning of a primary always leads to one, inevitable question: Who is the front-runner?
The answer to that question depends on a seemingly esoteric (but important) question: How do you define front-runner? If you define it as the candidate who has a better chance that any one other candidate, you can easily make the case that Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, or one of the familiar faces is the front-runner. But if you define it as the candidate who has a better shot than the rest of the candidates combined, then there’s definitely no front-runner.
Put in a less esoteric, jargon-y way, I think you should take the field over any individual candidate at this point. National polls, state polls, and traditional political science methods lead me to that conclusion.
National polls don’t point to a clear favorite. Biden typically leads with support somewhere in the 20 to 30 percent range, and Sanders is usually somewhere close-to-but-not-quite-at 20 percent. Those aren’t the numbers that a dominant candidate posts. “Undecided” often beats Sanders and sometimes beats Biden. Hillary Clinton’s numbers were much stronger at a comparable point in the 2016 cycle and in 2008. And remember: She faced an unexpectedly tough challenge from Sanders in 2016 and lost to Barack Obama in 2008. If you price in the fact that name identification is likely helping Sanders and Biden (i.e., that voters who lead normal lives and haven’t tuned in yet might just say the name of a candidate they know now and change their mind later), it looks even flimsier for the poll leaders.
State polling data is also ambiguous. We don’t have much information from Iowa or New Hampshire—and the polls we do have are often a little old or include a weird slate of candidates. But the information we have suggests that current candidate leads could be easily flipped and turned around when voters engage in the process.
Traditional political science methods also point to an open race. An influential political science book called The Party Decides basically argued that political movers and shakers tended to coordinate around one candidate ahead of time, and that they use their money, power, and influence to persuade voters and help their candidate win. They used endorsements to measure this sort of invisible coordination process.
I have some serious doubts about this theory (more fully explicated here). But if you’re a fan of it, it’s worth noting that the Democratic movers and shakers don’t seem to have picked a favorite yet. Obviously they still have time. But it’s not clear to me that they’ll reach a consensus; there are a lot of Democratic candidates who have a legitimate claim to their party’s nomination but none of them are runaway favorites at this point.
Common sense also confirms that there’s no Democratic front-runner. It’s easy for anyone who has watched a couple of Democratic primaries play out to design a winning coalition for multiple different candidates: Sanders, Harris, Biden, and others. There just isn’t a prohibitive favorite like there was in the 2016 Democratic primary.
My point here isn’t to squash the hopes of the Bernie Bros or the Biden people. One of those candidates might open up a wide lead, winning the primary fast. My point is to say that there’s no front-runner in a probabilistic sense—that is, there’s nobody who I think has better odds than the field right now. To me that means there’s no front-runner, and there might not be one for a while.
