Today, former Vice President Joe Biden released two new plans, building on his “Build Back Better” platform and updating the climate plan first released by his campaign last year.
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If Joe Biden can earn the support of a critical mass of these voters it makes it much more likely he can win back Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and secure an Electoral College victory.
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Between early April and late May, only 11 percent of ads aired by Democrats and their affiliated SuperPACs promoted Biden.
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At one point last year, Elizabeth Warren looked poised to become a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. She was second in the national polling during much of the fall and was even leading polls in key states like Iowa and New Hampshire. But, by December, she had faded in the polls. She hasn’t finished higher than third in any state through Super Tuesday, including her home state of Massachusetts. At this point, Warren’s improbable path to victory involves a brokered convention, as her campaign acknowledged last week.
Why hasn’t she caught on?
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Pete Buttigieg ran for Treasurer of State in Indiana in 2010 against Republican Richard Mourdock, best known for a disastrous 2012 Senate race where he made comments about rape and what “God intended.” Buttigieg lost the Treasurer race 62.5% to 37.5%, a margin of 24.9%, which represents a nadir for Democratic performances in the state. The other four statewide Democratic candidates in Indiana that year lost by margins between 14.6% to 21.3%. We have compiled the 51 Indiana statewide elections with a Democratic and Republican candidate since 1996 (the oldest year with a source for official election results online) and found that only one Democrat lost by more than Buttigieg did in 2010: David L. Johnson in 2000, the opponent of famously popular Richard Lugar for Senate. Of the 51 elections, Democrats won eight, and the median margin was a Republican win by 11.0%.
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Data for Progress polled a sample of 1,434 Likely Voters in the state of Louisiana ahead of Saturday’s run-off for the Governor’s seat. We project a victory for Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards with a margin of 50.2 percent for the Governor against 49.8 percent for his Republican opponent, businessmen Eddie Rispone. All state offices are up for election in parishes that otherwise did not have a majority conclusion in the initial primary on October 12. Our poll finds the incumbent Governor John Bel Edwards has a shot at retaining the Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge, but that the race is essentially a toss-up. The Governor has a narrow advantage due to strong early turnout, an overall surge in turnout that continues the swing in the suburbs towards the Democrats, and a changed electorate from the primary.
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On Friday, Upshot / Siena polling suggested that Democratic voters want a candidate who would “promise to find common ground with Republicans,” “be more moderate than most Dems” and “promise to bring politics in Washington back to normal.” Many pundits used this to suggest that “online” progressives don’t represent the party more broadly, and that voters seek a moderate nominee. Polling from Data for Progress and YouGov Blue tell a different story. We find that when voters are given the choice between a progressive and a more centrist policy, they overwhelmingly prefer the more progressive options. A previous Data for Progress and YouGov Blue conjoint experiment showed similar results, with Democratic voters supporting an outsider candidate over an establishment candidate and ambitious climate policy over a more centrist options.
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Democrats are favored to take a majority in the State Senate tomorrow. Our polling suggests a pick-up of three Senate seats for the Democratic Party, which, combined with a likely win in the House of Delegates, would give the Democratic Party a trifecta in the Old Dominion for the first time since 1993. We also found that a progressive agenda remains popular in the Senate battleground districts.
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By C.M. Lewis and Kevin Reuning
Incumbent Democrats have good reason to be worried.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning upset primary victory over Joe Crowley, one of the highest-ranking Democrats in House leadership, signaled that the Left is no longer content to settle for the incrementalism of the Democratic old guard and that the base is willing to buck the familiar.
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As the next Democratic debate gets underway, we present new data on how voters feel about each of the candidates remaining in the primary, and how those voters might shift depending on the candidates they currently favor and disfavor. While Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren currently leads the pack, we also find that she is the most popular second-choice candidate for voters who currently support other front-runners. Unlike past surveys, which found that supporters of this or that candidate tend to approve of Democrats across the board, we’re now finding significant variation in how supporters of each candidate feel about the other candidates. Although we don’t find clean “lanes” we do find that supporters do see ideological differences among candidates. For instance, unlike some pollsters, we find that the second place choice of Sanders supporters is Warren, not Biden, suggesting that voters do see the two candidates as ideologically similar.
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A new Data for Progress survey shows that Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, is favored in the gubernatorial primary election on Saturday, October 12, commanding a strong plurality of the vote (48 percent) over his closest Republican competitors. The Louisiana secretary of state is currently projecting a 45–46 percent turnout, and with strong turnout numbers, Governor Edwards might well clear the 50 percent threshold he needs to avoid a runoff election in November.
We also find that a wide breadth of modeled likely voters support a broad range of progressive policy positions, including criminal justice reform, Medicaid expansion, a $15 minimum wage, and the government negotiating prescription drug costs.
Data for Progress has been testing a new method for short, ten- to twenty-question surveys that can help progressive organizations achieve low-cost responses in small geographies. The method, called Volunteer-Initiated Text-to-Mobile Survey (VITMS, pronounced “vitamins”) is a standard text-to-web instrument delivered through volunteers.
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In this post, we focus on the role of attention voters report they pay to the news. As we show, news attention is an important predictor of candidate vote choice. Those who report following news most of the time systematically differ from those who do not. As voters’ attention to the news will change over the course of the primary, this has important implications for the decisions candidates will make as the primaries draw near.
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