Joe Biden is no longer at the top of our national polling average. How high can Bernie Sanders go?
Welcome to Poll Watch from On Politics. Every Friday, we’ll bring you the latest data and analysis to track the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. |
Current state of the race |
Who’s up? Who’s down? Here’s the latest. |
Joe Biden is no longer the Democratic front-runner. |
Against the backdrop of his defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire, Mr. Biden has fallen sharply in our national polling average. For the first time, he is behind Bernie Sanders, who has climbed to his highest point in the race yet. While the gap between them is just 1 percentage point, the trajectory of the last month is more decisive: Mr. Sanders has been rising steadily, while Mr. Biden has taken a sudden dive. |
At the moment, only two other candidates are gaining in the polls, and by decidedly modest margins: Michael Bloomberg and Pete Buttigieg. But none of the polls in our current average was taken after the New Hampshire primary, so the trend lines may not fully capture the latest movement in the race. If Amy Klobuchar made national gains after her surprise third-place finish in New Hampshire, or if Mr. Buttigieg has vacuumed up much more of Mr. Biden’s support in the last few days, we would not see that reflected here. |
If the race is in a moment of turmoil, the big picture seems more or less clear. Mr. Sanders is consolidating support on the left of the party, though Elizabeth Warren has held steady so far in the double digits, while Mr. Biden struggles and no other moderate has risen rapidly to take his place. Unless Mr. Biden recovers his footing, or one of the other center-left Democrats picks up support quickly, Mr. Sanders could develop a convincing lead over a fractured group of rivals. |
This state of play could get confirmed or shaken up next week in Nevada, when the candidates will debate on Feb. 19 before the state’s nominating caucuses on Feb. 22. Mr. Biden had been the favorite there, but Mr. Sanders and several other candidates — most notably Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Warren — have strong operations in the state. And as we saw in New Hampshire, the race is fluid enough for large numbers of voters to change their minds at the very end. |
The Nevada debate has the makings of a major moment in the campaign, with the potential to anoint someone as the strongest moderate in the race and to put Mr. Bloomberg’s candidacy to a strenuous test. He is one poll away from qualifying for the debate, and if he makes it onstage, it will be the first time he is in an adversarial situation with a group of more practiced opponents eager to take him on. |
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Bernie Sanders is on the rise. But how high can his numbers go? |
 | | While many moderate Democrats blanch at the full-throated leftism of Bernie Sanders’s policies, few in the party actually dislike the senator himself, polls show. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times |
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Senator Bernie Sanders has a solid base of support. That much is clear. |
And he has done a remarkably good job of boxing out Senator Elizabeth Warren for the support of the party’s left wing. He is now the choice of nearly half of Democratic voters who identify as “very liberal,” according to national polls; Ms. Warren is stuck in the 20s with that group. |
But does Mr. Sanders have room to grow? In a Democratic field overloaded with well-liked candidates, can he expand his coalition beyond the young, liberal base that has always backed him? |
Or, in a race this crowded, does he even need to? |
While many moderate Democrats blanch at the full-throated leftism of Mr. Sanders’s policies, few in the party actually dislike the senator himself. Nearly three-quarters of Democratic voters have a favorable opinion of Mr. Sanders, while only 20 percent see him negatively, according to a recent Monmouth University poll. That puts his net favorability rating at 53, higher than any other Democrat in the race — and at least 15 points better than any other candidate, with the exception of Ms. Warren (her net favorability rating is 48). |
And while his proposals for a single-payer health care system, free public college and a Green New Deal put him firmly on the party’s left flank, polls show that a wide majority of Democratic voters support them. |
Some moderate Democrats still hold Mr. Sanders in suspicion after 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College to Donald J. Trump after a nomination fight against Mr. Sanders. In a CNN poll last month, Mr. Sanders commanded the support of 27 percent of Democrats, but only 16 percent said he was the best candidate to unite the party. |
“For many of them, they’ll never forget how he dealt with Hillary Clinton,” said Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist who worked on Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, referring to hesitant Democratic voters. |
Yet the biggest obstacle for Mr. Sanders, Vermont’s junior senator, may be the perception that his ideas are too radical — and his persona too cantankerous — to win a general election. Democrats this year are largely united by their obsession with defeating Mr. Trump: More than three in five Democratic voters in both Iowa and New Hampshire said they preferred a candidate who could beat Mr. Trump over one who agreed with them on most issues, according to entrance and exit polls. Among those electability-minded voters, Mr. Sanders finished behind Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., in both states, the polls showed. |
Mr. Sanders’s campaign has pushed a “Bernie Beats Trump” slogan since it began early last year, and his proponents have long pointed to the fact that head-to-head polls tend to show him looking roughly as strong as former Vice President Joe Biden against Mr. Trump. And to a degree, it is catching on: Mr. Sanders is now seen as the most electable candidate by 24 percent of Democratic voters; in the fall, only one-tenth of Democrats saw him that way. |
Much remains in flux, and the results of the coming contests — in Nevada, South Carolina and the 14 states that will vote on Super Tuesday — will have a big impact on the rest of the race. But there are already some hopeful signs for Mr. Sanders. |
Monmouth’s most recent poll of Democratic voters found that he enjoys 30 percent support among respondents living in states that will vote after Super Tuesday, versus just 21 percent among earlier voters. If he continues to do well enough to maintain front-runner status through Super Tuesday, on March 3, he may have a slightly easier map for the rest of the primary season. |
Sean McElwee, the co-founder of the progressive think tank Data for Progress, said that Mr. Sanders’s high favorability ratings put him in a stronger position to win over moderate Democrats than many pundits acknowledged. |
“Bernie Sanders has incredibly high favorability numbers among Democrats; voters overwhelmingly view him positively,” Mr. McElwee added. “I think the idea that he was unelectable was always a myth.” |
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