Every recent national poll of the Democratic race agrees that the top three candidates are Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, in some order. And most of these polls have continued to show the former vice president in first place with a healthy lead.
The state of the 2020 Democratic primary polls, explained
There are three candidates at the top.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
But a new national poll from Monmouth University raised eyebrows Monday because it showed a tie between Sens. Warren and Sanders for first, with Biden just 1 point behind them. (That’s effectively a three-way tie, considering the poll’s margin of error.) The shocking result sent cable news into a frenzy.
However, two newer polls released Wednesday morning — from USA Today/Suffolk and Quinnipiac — both showed Biden continuing to hold on to a healthy lead. Biden leads by 11.8 in the RealClearPolitics poll average. One other poll, from the Economist and YouGov, does show a relatively smaller Biden lead (4 points). But still, it’s clear now that the Monmouth result was an outlier.
The Monmouth poll was the only poll tracked by RCP in over four months that showed anyone other than Biden in first place — so, naturally, it became the subject of intense news coverage. Polls showing Biden continuing to lead are generally deemed less exciting and get less attention.
But there’s one more consistent takeaway in all these recent polls. Biden, Sanders, and Warren are now the top three contenders — and Sen. Kamala Harris, who briefly surged after the first debate in June, has fallen into a lower tier.
As more polls have come in, it’s become clear that Monmouth’s result was an outlier
All year, the top line of Democratic primary polls has been quite consistent: Biden is winning. Poll after poll has shown him in first place.
Yet many Democratic elites and members of the media have long wondered whether Biden’s lead would hold up to the rigors of the campaign trail. They have questioned whether Biden is a sufficiently exciting candidate and whether he is in touch with today’s Democratic electorate.
So many politicos and pundits have been looking closely for signs of a Biden poll collapse. While Biden did lose some support (about 5 points in RCP’s average) after his tense exchange with Harris on busing during the first debate, he regained basically all of it before the second debate.
This week’s surprising Monmouth poll result, with Sanders and Warren both at 20 percent and Biden at 19 percent, came in that context.
Biden pollster Joe Anzalone tried to dismiss the Monmouth poll, and called attention to its relatively small sample — it’s based on responses from 298 Democratic or Democratic-leaning registered voters. That is indeed on the smaller side compared to recent Democratic sample sizes from CNN (402), Fox News (483), and Quinnipiac (807). In fact, if you scroll through FiveThirtyEight’s tally of sample sizes, Monmouth’s is the smallest of any recent polls.
Still, a bigger sample size does not necessarily make for a more credible poll; the sampling and weighting processes are also quite important. And Monmouth is also a well-regarded polling organization with an A+ rating from FiveThirtyEight.
The better reason to refrain from jumping to conclusions about the Monmouth result was that it’s generally a bad idea to automatically “believe” any one new poll showing a sudden change. The best practice is to keep it in mind as one interesting new data point and to wait to see if other new polls back up its findings. And now, two days later, it’s clear that other polls haven’t.
The top three are Biden, Sanders, and Warren
One thing that all recent polls, including Monmouth, have agreed on is the identities of the top three candidates: Biden, Sanders, and Warren (in some order).
That is to say: not Kamala Harris, not South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and not anyone else in the enormous field.
For a few weeks after the first debate in June, it had seemed that there was a top tier of four candidates, with Harris joining the other three. From that debate alone, she doubled her support from about 7.5 percent beforehand to about 15 percent afterward (per RCP’s average).
But since mid-July, Harris’s trajectory has not been good: She’s lost all the support she’d gained and is now right back at 7.5 percent.
This is in stark contrast to Warren. At the beginning of the year, Warren polled in a distant fourth or even fifth place. But since May, she’s had a steady rise that has put her in a near-tie with long-standing second-place candidate Bernie Sanders.
As for Sanders himself — Warren’s rise spurred a round of punditry asserting that Sanders was done for. But the latest results show he very much remains a contender.
Finally, as always with national polling we should remember that there is of course no national primary, and that the results of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary will make major headlines and reshape the race before the vast majority of the country votes. There hasn’t been much polling of either state lately, but in general Biden had led both — though his leads there have been smaller than his national leads.
This article has been updated with newer poll results.
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