How Front-Runners Can Fail

Former Vice President Joe Biden is the early front-runner in the 2020 Democratic presidential race — for the moment, at least. He leads in national polls and most surveys of the early primaries and caucuses, but if Biden were to falter, he wouldn’t be the first early primary front-runner to come up short.

Curious to understand how other high-name-recognition early front-runners have fared, we looked at candidates who consistently led in the polls at the outset of the campaign yet failed to win their party’s nomination. CONT.

Geoffrey Skelley, FiveThirtyEight