Real Clear Politics 2020 Presidential Polls, No. 1

Hard to believe: we're still 18 months away from Election 2020, but the presidential campaign has already heated up.

On the Democratic side, we've got 21 candidates with their hats already in the ring, and 4 more who might run.

On the Republican side, President Donald Trump is certainly going to run for a second term. Former Massachusetts governor William Weld is openly challenging him. Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland and/or former Ohio governor/congressman John Kasich may also run against Trump. Yet I can't believe Weld or Hogan or Kasich has any real chance to unseat the sitting president as the GOP standard bearer.

The real action is on the Democratic side. So it's time to take a peek at the polls to see which of them has a solid chance of becoming the Democratic nominee. The place to start peeking is at the Real Clear Politics web site.

RCP monitors the entire gamut of political opinion polls. Its "latest polls" page is here. As of Friday, May 3, 2019 — scroll down to find it — this was the situation in head-to-head matchups between Trump and his top Democratic challengers:

Click to enlarge

This comes as a pleasant surprise to me, a Democrat and Never Trumper: all but one of the six Democrats shown in the above image beat the president, at least in the latest CNN poll, Beto O'Rourke by fully 10 points! The candidate I favor most, Joe Biden, is up by 6 points, in a tie with Bernie Sanders. Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg lead Trump by 4 and 3 points, respectively. The only Democrat shown above whom Trump actually beats (albeit by just 1 point) is Elizabeth Warren.

Joe Biden is way ahead of the other hopefuls in pre-primary polls of just Democratic voters:

Click to enlarge

Biden leads his nearest rival, Sanders, by an "RCP average" of 23.5 points. Biden's "RCP average" polling figure is 39.0. That of Sanders is 15.5. And that of O'Rourke comes in at a puny 4.3.

True, O'Rourke's 10-point lead over Trump (see first image above) is from just a single poll, that of CNN. Other polls place him ahead of Trump, but by smaller margins:

Click to enlarge

Still, I find it surprising that one of the least-known candidates, O'Rourke, (see that second image above) beats the likes of Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and several others, many of whom are established national figures, as O'Rourke is not.

Between the leader, Biden, and the upstart O'Rourke (see the second image above) we find:

• Sanders
• Warren
• Harris
• Buttigieg (another upstart, but at least one who currently holds local office: mayor of South Bend, Indiana)

The Female Candidates

Warren and Harris are the leading female candidates. They are basically running neck-and-neck behind Biden and Sanders, both of whom are male. Of those two women, only Harris currently leads Trump in a head-to-head matchup (see first image above). Warren, running slightly behind Trump in head-to-head popularity, is nonetheless drawing a lot of media coverage — as is Kamala Harris.

Klobuchar and Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard barely register, at this juncture, in the second image above. (It's not clear to me why New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand doesn't even show up there.)

So the female candidates all have a steep hill to climb if they expect to outpoll and out-primary Biden and Sanders, thereby to gain the Democratic nomination to run against Trump. My guess is that they cannot achieve it — unless they can convince women voters by the boatload to surge to the primaries and state caucuses to proudly vote for one of their own gender.

But look at this RCP graph — see here:

Click to enlarge

It shows that since April 25, the day Biden announced he is running for president, the other female Democratic hopefuls have either lost support or are flatlining at very low levels — all except Elizabeth Warren, that is. Warren (the brown line on the graph) has generally been gaining support recently — albeit that she remains at fairly low levels relative to Biden and (the noticeably plummeting) Sanders.

Accordingly, Warren would seem to be the strongest of the female Democratic candidates, at least for now.

Notice, though, that in the graph above, Pete Buttigieg has risen from 2.3 on April 5 to 6.8 on May 7. (To verify those numbers, go to the source of the graph here and scroll down, if need be, to see the graph. Then move your mouse pointer over the graph from side to side. You'll see an exact date along with candidates' names and their polling numbers. For example:

Click to enlarge

So Buttigieg, until recently largely unknown but currently showing real strength, also has a solid chance to become the ultimate Biden/Sanders-slayer. We ought to keep in mind that Buttigieg is openly gay. Accordingly, he seems to have a palpable chance of becoming the groundbreaking president whose "first lady" is of his own gender!

Still and all, there's a huge amount of time before the first of the state caucuses/primaries (see here for dates of 2020 primaries and caucuses). The very first contest is the Iowa caucus on Monday, Feb. 3. When the Iowa results are in, we can expect certain candidates who have done poorly to drop out. Their supporters would need to switch to other candidates, perhaps boosting one or more of the remaining hopefuls into significantly greater prominence.

Then will come a gamut of later primaries and caucuses, after each of which there are likely to be more dropouts. It's not impossible that after a certain point, only one candidate will remain whose name is not Biden or Sanders. That candidate could be Buttigieg, or it could be a woman. If a woman — probably either Warren or Harris — she is likely to have picked up the support of voters who preferred other women, now out of the race. She would then probably need to outstrip both Biden and Sanders to gain the Democratic nomination.

In other words, there might well develop a scenario wherein a woman or a gay man, Buttigieg, becomes Trump's actual opponent in the general election of November 2020!