The state of the Democratic primary elections of 2020, explained



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All recent national polls on the Democratic race agree that the top three candidates are Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, in a certain order. And most of these polls continued to show the former vice president in first place with a healthy lead.

A new national poll of Monmouth University made eyebrow Monday because it showed a tie between Sens. Warren and Sanders for the first time, with Biden at one point behind. (This is a link to three, given the margin of error of the survey.)

Most of this month's national polls continued to show Biden ahead with double-digit numbers, and a CNN poll conducted some of the same days that Monmouth showed Biden up 11 points. Biden is in the lead of 10.5 in the average RealClearPolitics survey. So, the result of Monmouth is currently an outlier.

Yet, more than four months have passed since a national survey followed by RCP showed someone other than Biden first place. This result deserves to be emphasized. And it's not just this poll that shows a tight contest. A recent survey by The Economist and YouGov revealed a tight race in the trio: Biden with 22%, Sanders with 19% and Warren with 18%.

It is too early to say that Biden is collapsing or is in serious trouble. However, all of these recent polls show that Biden, Sanders and Warren are now the top three candidates – and that Senator Kamala Harris, who jumped briefly after the first debate in June, fell into the lower category.

The result of Monmouth is interesting, but we should wait for further polls before concluding that the race has changed dramatically.

All year long, the first line of the Democratic primary poll has been relatively consistent: Biden wins. A poll after the other showed him first place.

Yet many democratic elites and members of the media have long wondered whether Biden's leadership will stand up to the rigors of the election campaign. They wondered if Biden was a sufficiently exciting candidate and if he was in touch with the democratic electorate of today.

So many politicians and agents have been looking at the signs of a collapse of the Biden poll. Although Biden lost some support (about 5 points in the RCP average) after his tense exchange with Harris in the first debate, he recovered almost everything before the second debate.

Now, however, there is the surprising result of this new Monmouth poll, with Sanders and Warren at 20% and Biden at 19%.

Joe Anzalone, Biden Sounder tried to fire The Monmouth poll drew attention to its relatively small sample, based on the responses of 298 registered, registered and Democrat voters. It's actually a little smaller than the recent Demo sample sizes from CNN (402), Fox News (483) and Quinnipiac (807). In fact, if you scroll through the total number of FiveThirtyEight samples, the one in Monmouth is the smallest of all recent polls.

Nevertheless, a larger sample size does not necessarily give a more credible survey; the sampling and weighting processes are also very important. Monmouth is also a reputable voting organization, rated A + by FiveThirtyEight.

We should not jump to the conclusions of the Monmouth result, but we should not dismiss it altogether either. It is usually a bad idea to automatically "believe" any new survey showing a sudden change. This is perhaps the first to show a significant underlying change, but it can also be a temporary shock or a particular case. Best practice is to keep this in mind as a new interesting data point and wait to see if other new surveys support its findings.

What seems clear is that the first three are Biden, Sanders and Warren.

Although recent polls do not all agree on the order of the first three candidates or the distance between them, they all agree on the identity of the first three: Biden, Sanders and Warren.

That is to say: not Kamala Harris, not South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, nor anyone else in this huge field.

A few weeks after the first debate in June, it seemed like there was a top group of four candidates, Harris joining the other three. From this debate alone, it doubled its support from about 7.5% to about 15% thereafter (by average CRP).

But since mid-July, Harris's trajectory has not been good: she has lost all the support she has received and has now returned to 7.5%.

This contrasts sharply with Warren. At the beginning of the year, Warren was away from the fourth, even fifth place. But since May, she has had a steady climb that has brought her closer to long-time runner-up Bernie Sanders.

As for Sanders himself, the rise of Warren caused a wave of ingredients claiming that Sanders was defeated. But the latest results show that there is still much to dispute.

Finally, as always with the national polls, we must remember that there is of course no primary primary and that the results of the caucuses of Iowa and New Hampshire will make the headlines of the press and reorganize the race before the vast majority of the country's voices. There have not been many investigations lately, but in general, Biden had led both – although his lead was lower than that of his country.

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