Election 2020: Biden, Sanders and Warren erect better against Trump

Democratic voters are stuck in a self-destructive loop.

The loop begins and ends with the polls. Pollsters know that Democrats want to know who is the most powerful candidate against President Donald Trump. So they conduct a lot of face-to-face polls comparing Trump to various candidates. Polls show that the best-known Democrats – former Vice President Joe Biden, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren – are the strongest candidates against him, which probably reinforces them in the polls. It is therefore difficult for the less well-known candidates to attract attention, which also guarantees that they will obtain poor results in face-to-face votes against Trump.

The problem is that the direct polls at this stage of the race largely reflect the recognition of the name of its challenger, rather than anything that could help you predict an election outcome over a year in the future .

It would be naïve to think that name recognition is the only reason why it is difficult for anyone to rank in the top three. Biden, Sanders and Warren are all formidable opponents who bring many strengths and political skills. But if voters in the Democratic primary really want to maximize their chances in 2020, they should consider looking outside the catastrophic loop and beyond the top three.

The first unnecessary votes, explained

According to a series of Fox News polls released on September 19, the Democrat who is doing the best against Trump is Biden. Sanders is second, followed by Warren, followed by Senator Kamala Harris.

A survey conducted in the United States on September 18 confirmed that Biden was doing better, followed by Sanders, then Warren and Harris. But they also included former representative Beto O'Rourke, who is even worse than Harris.

On September 11th, an ABC / Washington Post poll revealed that Biden was doing better, followed by Sanders, then Warren and Harris. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who is worse than Harris, did not include O'Rourke.

Taken in isolation, you could see Biden's strength in these polls as a reflection of his moderate ideology. But then, it's hard to understand why Sanders would be second. Maybe the voters are just misogynists. But then, why are Warren and Harris doing better than O'Rourke and Buttigieg?

Another sign that there is something fishy about these numbers is that the differences between the candidates are incredibly large. The difference between a strong candidate and a weak candidate may be the difference between winning and losing, but even if static voters are real, we also know that they are relatively rare. There can not really be 10% of the population voting for Biden without refusing to vote for Harris.

A real clear policy

And note that Trump's numbers do not really change much. The Fox poll has him at 38 against Biden against 40 against Harris. The difference between Biden's crush of 14 and Harris narrowly winning (and likely losing the Electoral College) by 2% is almost entirely due to the fact that there are more undecided in the ### Harris sample.

But the reason so many people are undecided when you ask questions about Harris, O'Rourke and Buttigieg is that many people do not know who they are. If they became Democratic candidates, this problem would obviously disappear.

Survey USA provided a useful lesson on the power of name recognition by interviewing various Democrats against Vice President Mike Pence and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. What they found is that not only the best-known Democrat does better in every case, but also the best-known Republican.

I guess Haley would do at least a little better than Trump if she magically became the Republican candidate. But this is only a guess. What I know for sure is that she would have no chance of losing 28 points against Biden and no way for O'Rourke to have 21 points less than Biden in a match against her. The candidate effects are not so important. We see here that name recognition is a powerful force and that, although O'Rourke and Haley are well-known political obsessed, many Americans do not know who these people are or anything about them.

Early elections at general elections are not informative

There are many people running around telling people to "ignore the ballot box", which is often bad advice in politics. Surveys are extremely valuable tools that can tell us a lot about what is happening and can often be very informative about the potential course of future events.

But this particular exercise polls hypothetical election confrontations well before the election is not informative.

In their book The chronology of the presidential electionsChristopher Wlezien and Robert Erikson believe that voting a year before the election has essentially no correlation with the outcome. In contrast, elections just before the elections have a strong correlation with the final result. And there is a healthy ground of understanding between 100 and 200 days when the correlation is not particularly strong, but it is not anything either.

Christopher Wlezien and Robert Erikson

Many consumers in this poll seem to believe that we are in this kind of situation where things can change, but where the returning officer is more likely to win the election. We are more than 400 days away from election day 2020, so far that it does not even appear on the chart above.

Of course, each survey provides us with information. Specifically, the fact that Trump systematically interrogates Biden, Sanders and Warren as a loser tells us that he is unpopular. But we can also simply check approval ratings to find out. And, indeed, the current 538 approvals tracking indicates that its approval numbers are underwater 42-53. It does not tell us much about the future. Obama was almost as unpopular at this stage of his presidency, but he rallied over the next year to get better approval and re-election rates.

But for now, Trump is unpopular and loses to well-known Democrats, while obscure Democrats generate a large number of "undecided" voters who – it was about A real campaign – would learn the existence of the Democratic candidate and vote for them.

Look beyond the top three

If Warren becomes the Democratic candidate and beats Trump, she will become, on the day of the inauguration, the oldest person ever sworn in the presidency of the United States.

The fact that she is three years younger than Trump should prevent this from becoming a general election liability, and the fact that she is younger than Sanders or Biden will certainly prevent her from being a primary election liability. But the fact remains that the three main Democratic candidates are exceptionally old for the presidential candidates.

They are also ideological outliers. Sanders is not an official member of the Democratic Party and has chosen to identify himself as a democratic socialist. Warren has often quarreled with members of Obama's economic team and has adopted a number of risky electoral positions, such as government benefits to undocumented immigrants. In contrast, Biden is positioned as the candidate for continuity with Barack Obama. But Obama has not voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq (Biden says it was a mistake), has no record as a leader in the world. a dishonest campaign of "crime suppression" in the 1990s, and is rather famous. speaker standout rather than a machine gaffe.

It was frustrating for me to see the 2016 Democratic primary play as a binary choice between an Iraqi hawk linked to the criminal policies of the Clinton era with unusually close ties to the financial services sector and a self-styled socialist. (Martin O'Malley would have won.)

In 2020, Democrats have a much larger field. This area includes, appropriately, many of the people you think would be a good candidate for the presidency – conventional democrats with the ideology of the conventional democratic party and who are in the conventional age range for a candidate to the presidency.

One can argue about who fits exactly here – former representative Beto O'Rourke is a bit underqualified; Mayor Pete Buttigieg is a little young (and under-qualified); Meaning. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker veered a little to the left; Senator Amy Klobuchar and Montana Governor Steve Bullock are probably more conservative than a typical Democratic leader, but this is an area of ​​options that is quite solid, including until recently Washington's rather conventional governor. , Jay Inslee.

Many of Warren and Sanders' most passionate supporters are aware of this and simply wish to propose an ideological aberration on the left. If that describes you, then more power for you. But Biden's strong position in the polls, the fact that Warren and Sanders combined only get one-third of the estimated vote and the fact that a good deal of Sanders supporters identify as moderate suggests that this does not is not the case. most democrats. If this is not the case, it's time to get out of the loop and take a closer look at the rest of the field.