Rasmussen national poll: Sanders Still Democrats’ Choice for 2020, But It’s Close

[Mr. Morden]

Right now the 2020 election is over 3 years away.

Scarily enough, the Iowa caucuses are less than 3 years away now.  New Hampshire will probably be 3 years from tomorrow.

[Mr. Morden]

At this point, it’s really an open question which names pollsters are going to include in hypothetical 2020 Democratic primary matchups over the next couple of years.  Biden, Sanders, and Clinton all have high name recognition, and so they’re inevitably going to dominate in polls where they’re included.  Though, yeah, none of them are among the most likely candidates to run, IMHO (because Biden and Sanders are both pretty old, and Clinton was just the nominee and lose the GE).

If you include both Biden and Clinton in the poll, then I’m guessing there’s enough overlap in support between them that, yeah, including them both puts Sanders in the lead.  But if you take out Clinton, like the PPP poll did, then Biden tends to show up in the lead.  Take out all three of Biden/Clinton/Sanders, and Warren will lead.  Warren of course trails Biden/Clinton/Sanders in name recognition, but she’s still ahead of the rest of the field.  How many “normal” people know who Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar are?  Very few, so whether you even include them in the poll or not probably doesn’t make much difference.

So I don’t think these early primary polls are all that useful, except that I’d like to see them testing favorability scores and name recognition.  That would be more useful to see than the horserace question.