The numbers used for this graph come from 38 national polls asking for voter preference about a varying number of candidates. There is a large variation across the polls in how many answered something other than a particular candidate (like “none”). These two factors cause useless and distracting variation in the actual percentage value given to a candidate for a given poll. You can imagine that if a certain candidate gets 23% of the “votes” in a given poll, that number could change a lot if non-answers were excluded, or the total number of candidates was different. An imperfect but still improved way to calculate the percent value for a given candidate is, then, to only look at a subset of the candidates across all the polls, and recalculate the percentage of polling for each candidate using only those numbers. That is what this graph shows, for these candidates only:

Biden
Booker
Buttigieg
Castro
Harris
Klobuchar
O’Rourke
Sanders
Warren
Yang

Why that particular list? Well, I noticed that if you look across all the polls, one minor candidate (minor in terms of percent in the collection of polls) seemed to vary from the middle of the middle tier to the bottom of the middle tier, but was never in the lowest lowest tier, and also, was polled from early on: Klobuchar. So, I took the RCP average at about the time of the debates, and applied the Klobuchar Factor. If you were below Klobuchar, you were out of consideration. Since then, the candidates have moved around a bit, and a present day Klobuchar Factor would produce a different list. But I don’t really care, because I just needed to have a cutoff somewhere.

The regression analysis suggests that about 56% of the variance seen in each canidates’ polls is explained by time (i.e., there is a pretty robust trend where time matters). I’ve extended the regression line out 20 days into the future, which would be the end of July.

So, getting back to the story of these two candidates. I want to consider each candidate separately. The reason they are both in the same graph, and blog post, is because they are the two candidates with the highest number across the entire data set, so the graph makes sense for their scale, and the process is cleaner of we separate out candidates by scale.

The story of Joe Biden is this: He started off high, around 50%, and ended up much weaker, closer to 30% with some of the most recent polls showing 25%. He halved, almost. Or at least, looking at the extended projection, he is in the process of measuring out his polling half-life, as it were. He was probably artificially high partly due to name recognition, and lost ground as other candidates gained. He also started out in a different sort of artificial high, as a well known and widely loved guy where policy had not been vetted, and has lost among Democrats in that way as well. But this is Biden, and this is how he has performed in his earlier presidential campaigns. Biden watchers are not surprised. Biden watchers will not be surprised if he isn’t really a factor in this campaign by the end of the year.

The story of Bernie Sanders is interesting. His numbers show the second lowest amount of variance, scaled by magnitude, of all the candidates. He started of around 20%. He is still around 20%. Bernie is not moving up, Bernie is not moving down. Well, maybe a tiny bit down. What he seems to be doing, really, is slowing down just a bit as Elizabeth Warren is passing him, much like a car going 45mph slows down a bit when a faster car is passing them on the highway. Though that is of course a bad analogy because the intentionality of events is very different.

In short, Biden is gliding to a campaign ending landing, while Sanders is flat-lining. The latter observation is, I think, the most significant. It tells us something, maybe, about Sanders campaign. His base is unmoving. This is expected, I think. I just hope that should Sanders not get the nomination nod, that base sees fit to support the nominee in 2020, all of them, different than what happened in 2016.

“For some historical perspective, let us remember this. There are members of today’s Senate that are old enough to remember working in the same chamber as ardent segregationists, older Senators left over from the days before the Kennedy-Johnson civil rights legislation. Senators who argued in their prime that Americans should be separated by skin color in every area of life from the use of a water fountain or bathroom to the school they attend or the job they can have. This is important because in other areas of legislation, there was more cooperation between Democrats and Republicans in those days than now. It is as though modern day Republican partisanship is deeper than any form of partisanship has ever been, with almost no good reason to exist from the point of view of politics or governance. It is nothing more than an intractable power grab by Mitch McConnel and his ilk who have, unfortunately, taken almost every elected seat their party holds in the US Congress and every state’s legislature.”

Instead he said “Yeah, cool, I once hung out with segregationists and we worked together OK and it was cool.”

The problem with Joe Biden making the broader and more accurate point I suggest above is that it would remind people of two things:

1) Joe is as old as the hills; and

2) Joe’s point that he can work across the aisle is outdated by decades, and untenable.

I saw this coming. Joe Biden has a history of gaffing his way into lower and lower poll numbers, and never quite getting that he is doing it, until he loses. I will support whatever nominee the Democratic Party yadayadayada. But I do hope the Descent of Biden happens now during the primary season rather than after the nomination is handed to him. Right now he is the most unbeatable of all the declared candidates according to head to head match-up polling. But he is, in fact, the most beatable of the major candidates, based on everything we know about him.

And here is one of those moments.

And, as you can see, some of Joe has rubbed off on Barack.