It’s been nigh unto four months since the last election ended...so we haven’t had any polls to analyze and I think I was going into withdrawal, ha. But owing to the perpetual elections of American politics, THE POLLS ARE BACK, BABY. The most recent release of the CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll is out.
To be sure, it’s waaaaaaaay too early to look at vote share totals, so I’ll largely ignore those. But we now have two in this polling series...what can we divine from the data?
Here are my takeaways.
1. Biden is a force to reckon with...but polls are kinda useless until we know if he’s in.
VP Biden is the strongest candidate in the poll hands-down, with an astronomical favorability amongst Iowa Dems (Net fav +66!) If he runs, his name recognition and favorables would offer a huge head start. The one possible small warning sign for him is that 31% of respondents said “his time has passed and he shouldn’t be in the race.” But 64% said he should be in owing to experience. He should be okay as long as this metric doesn’t drop considerably for him.
Biden’s results in this poll indicate that the race will be vastly different whether he’s in or out. I don’t think we can predict what the poll would look like if he wasn’t included...he’s such a force in the results that a poll taken if he doesn’t run would be dramatically different from this one. For that matter, I’m not sure that his status as unannounced isn’t affecting this poll in one direction or another.
So until he decides, the shape of this race is pretty undetermined. Iowans seem to think he’s in.
2. Harris’ favorables stand out
Sen. Harris improved both her favorable and unfavorable rating over the December version of this poll. She managed to increase her favorable to 58% from 49%, while decreasing unfavorable from 10% to 9%. She’s also reduced “not sure” from 41 to 33, so these seem like indicators that the campaign is doing their job on the ground in Iowa.
Julián Castro was the only other candidate to improve both metrics, moving from 27/10 to 33/8...but 58% of respondents are still unsure about him, so he has work to do in the state.
Klobuchar (from 38/8 to 43/15) and Booker (from 49/12 to 53/14) both saw increases to both favorable and unfavorable. Klobuchar’s spike in unfavorable responses seems like a concern, particularly in this state, which I think she needs to do well in.
Gillibrand and Sanders both lost ground, with net favorable dropping 6 points for either. I’d call Gillibrand’s performance a red flag for her campaign — she went from 35/10 to 35/16. A six point jump in unfavorable while gaining no ground seems notable.
As it stands, the top five performers in net favorable in this poll are:
1. Biden: +66 (again, wow)
2. Harris: +49
3. Sanders: +46
4. Warren: +43
5. Beto: +40
3. Warning signs for Sanders in the data
I think that Iowa is more crucial for Sanders, Warren and Klobuchar than some of the other contenders, under the theory that this is where they have potential to offset potential losses elsewhere in the initial primaries. South Carolina and Nevada’s more diverse electorates could easily drive the narrative coming out of the first month of voting as we head into Super Tuesday, where the voters look a lot more like SC and NV than IA.
Sanders remains strong in the polling, but I do see a couple of warning signs. First, his net favorability dropped by six points. That seems significant, particularly since the changes don’t represent voters moving from unsure...the fluctuation shows voters changing their minds and migrating less favorable.
A second warning sign is that 43% of respondents state that Sanders’ “Time as a candidate has passed, and he should not be in the race.” That’s 12 points higher than the response to that question for Biden. I’d call this a “yellow flag”, because I suspect these respondents aren’t from his voting bloc, and he can still perform well in a large field even with this response.
But the result that feels like a definitive red flag is a question over whether the candidates are too liberal, about right or too conservative. Sanders scores off the charts from the others in too liberal responses, at 44%. Warren is next highest at 23%, Harris is third at 12%. This is a 20 point swing in a negative direction for Sanders over this poll in 2016, and at a +4 net “about right” ideology metric, he is by far the lowest performer on this question. What draws my attention most is that Warren is +31 net about right. Why is that? Why does she perform so much better than Sanders? I’m not sure, which is why I think this question is a red flag for Sanders.
4. Healthcare is king, but…
When asked what Dem voters want to hear the candidates speak about, healthcare remains the top priority, with 81% of respondents saying they want candidates to speak about the issue “a lot.”
But what's super interesting is that climate change has risen in the ranks for these sort of issue questions, and 80% of respondents want to hear the candidate speak about this issue a lot. I did my wonk due diligence and pulled up ten Iowa polls from before the 2016 caucus, and I could not find this question asked in similar fashion for comparison. The closes I could find is a CNN poll asking whether issues were “very important,” and health care was the top response...but climate change wasn’t even on the list.
This response, plus a 91% positive response toward the Green New Deal, are signs that climate change may play a larger role in this election than any previous cycle. Which seems intuitive, but the data is bearing this out.
5. The race is wide open, and Iowa is boring.
The data indicate that, as we might expect, there’s no clear favorite. Too many moving parts and too many unknowns. As of today, the polling makes it look like Iowa would spread delegates around so that no one would emerge with too much of a lead. So I suspect that we will talk and talk about Iowa, then the second it’s over we will be looking at a 5 delegate advantage for someone or other, and all forget about Iowa for another four years.
What the data doesn’t indicate is that Iowa is boring — that part is just my opinion. But as a liberal I feel entitled to gripe. They are still using a caucus, which is a stupid system, and it’s still going to have its stupid mechanisms like the 2016 coin toss debacle. It’s still a 91% white state with an utter lack of economic diversity. And they still use their self-importance, which is only a result from calendar placement, to make us all watch the candidates and journalists curry favor by shoving the filth that Iowans call food into their faces. I swear to god, every four years we get to the god damned Iowa State Fair and I always vomit at least once at the greasy slop that is passed off as something humans should actually consume. Iowa should be moved to June just so that we don’t have to watch that horror show.
(I’m being silly, obviously, but I’m still haunted by a segment in which Chuck Todd saw how much fried food he could buy with $50 in a half hour, and sampled it all. That did make me physically ill, lol.)
There are 601 days until we get to hold a revolution at the ballot box and tell the GOP what we think of them.