A poll released by CNN asking Democratic voters to express their preferences on potential Democratic presidential candidates shows former Vice President Joe Biden leading a potentially very crowded field. …
The first, and most obvious, response to this poll is that it is very early to say much of anything about the 2020 presidential primary race. With the 2018 midterms a few weeks away, we are likely to see some activity among the different likely candidates by the end of the year, but if recent years are an indication we probably will not see most campaign announcements until the spring or even summer of 2019 Additionally, primaries are complicated elections to predict. In general elections, many voters rely on their partisanship to determine who to support. That is, someone who self-identifies as a Republican will nearly always vote for the Republican candidate. In primaries, this doesn’t help any of the candidates since all of them are from the same party. Thus, voters have to do a lot more work to figure out who to vote for. Combined, prognosticating on presidential primaries this far ahead is something of a fool’s errand.
That being said, let us dramatically overanalyze what the CNN poll, and political science research on presidential primaries, suggests about the way the 2020 primaries could play out! CONT.
Boris Heersink (Fordham), A House Divided
Recent polls: White House 2020