Polling the Tammy/Tammy Ticket
By Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee)
Data for Progress has long maintained that to the extent electability exists, the most electable Democrat is not an old centrist fogey like Biden. Rather, Democrats need someone who is able to translate progressive policies in a way that persuades swing voters while mobilizing the base. Someone like Tammy Baldwin, who won re-election by 11 points even while Tony Evers knocked off Scott Walker by a point.
Anyways, we polled it and indeed, a Tammy / Tammy ticket would be an electoral behemoth capable of slaying Trump.
Respondents were asked,
“If the election were held tomorrow, and you had to choose between the following theoretical pairs of candidates, who would you vote for in the Presidential election?
<1> Democrat Tammy Baldwin for President and Tammy Duckworth for Vice President
<2> Republican Donald Trump for President and Mike Pence for Vice President
<3> Don’t know.” (Responses were randomized)
The result is below.
It’s no surprise. Tammy Baldwin is an electoral force. In her recent re-election, she dominated Wisconsin so much that even getting rid of liberal bastions Madison and Milwaukee wouldn’t cause her to lose. Tammy Baldwin sleeps on a bed made of the skulls of men who have underestimated her, whether it was Tommy Thompson in 2012 (Sabato’s Crystal Ball rated the race as Lean Republican, Baldwin won by 5.5 points) or the Koch Brothers, who have spent millions to unseat her to no avail. She burst onto the seen as an insurgent candidate unseating the party’s favored Rick Phelps in 1998 and has been an unabashed supporter of single-payer healthcare for years.
Pundits who want to root their “electability” narratives in reality should consider Tammy / Tammy the most electable Democratic ticket.
The survey was fielded from March 30, 2019 to April 4, 2019 using YouGov’s online panel. The sample size of the survey was 1,309 and the margin of error of the survey is 3.1 percent. The survey was weighted to be nationally representative of the population of US voters by age, race, sex, and education.
Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee) is a co-founder of Data for Progress