| I was away for a long weekend and returned to find plenty of new polls, along with what seems to be an emerging conventional wisdom that debates really matter and that they've upended the Democratic nomination contest for 2020.
Well: perhaps and perhaps.
The polls have certainly changed. Former Vice President Joe Biden has lost about five percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average. Senator Bernie Sanders has also lost a couple. Senator Elizabeth Warren is up by about one percentage point and Senator Kamala Harris has shot up by six. So Biden still has a solid but smaller lead, while Harris, Sanders and Warren are now in a three-way tie for second. That's new.
Remember, though, that it's still very early. An initial round of good results for Harris could lead to a continued surge, or her support could dissipate over the next week or two. We've seen that happen a number of times already this cycle.
Suppose the results stick. Can we call that a debate effect? That's not clear either. It could be that the debate did nothing more than push people in the direction they were already heading – that is, toward the strong but little-known candidates, and away from weaker but better-known candidates.
If the relatively good numbers that Biden and Sanders have maintained so far were mainly due to name recognition, then it was always likely that they'd fade as other candidates became better known and voters started paying attention. But all that's really happened so far is that both of them have lost their announcement bumps. Biden is right where he was at the beginning of 2019, and Sanders is just slightly lower.
That said, it's not exactly a coincidence that Harris and Warren benefited from the debates. Yes, they both had strong showings. But given their support among party actors – and Harris in particular appears to be doing well according to several measures – it was likely that their performances would be amplified. On the other side, while there are some indications of party support for Biden, there also seems to be some ambivalence and even opposition to him. And there's quite a bit of opposition to Sanders.
This isn't an elite conspiracy; there are thousands of politicians, campaign and governing professionals, formal party staff and officials, activists and donors and interest groups, all of whom make up the expanded Democratic Party, and all of whom are competing over the nomination. To be sure: President Donald Trump won the nomination in 2016 with minimal support from party actors and quite a bit of opposition. But so far none of the things that worked in Trump's favor in 2016 appears to be operating with Democrats running for 2020, and it's likely that party actors will have a major voice in determining the nomination.
So we probably should pay more attention to indicators of party support and less to fluctuations in the polls at this point. Especially since we'll have another debate in just a few weeks to scramble things up again.
1. Rachel Bitcofer has published her forecast for the 2020 election. A must-read.
2. Excellent Seth Masket item about Democratic campaign staffers.
3. Bruce Cain on partisan gerrymandering after the Supreme Court's decision (and see here for other views).
4. See also a Dave Hopkins piece at the Monkey Cage about another group of party actors – Republicans in the media and their role in the Roy Moore story.
5. Dan Drezner on Trump's foreign policy.
6. David Graham on Trump and the truth.
7. Nate Cohn on new types of polling.
8. And Jonathan Chait on more things that Trump doesn't know.
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