Joe Biden has emerged from a contested Democratic primary with surprising party unity and without any serious threat on his left flank, according to New York Times/Siena College polls of the six battleground states likeliest to decide the presidency. Over all, voters in the battleground states who said Bernie Sanders […] Read more »
Democrats named Biden, Sanders and Warren as their top picks 18 months ago. What did the primaries change?
Former vice president Joe Biden is now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president — after a primary involving months of campaigning, 28 Democratic candidates and over $1 billion in ads. Did any of that affect the result? Not much, our research suggests — but they weren’t meaningless. We’ll explain below. […] Read more »
Inside the 3 days that remade the Democratic primary
At Mike Bloomberg’s midtown Manhattan campaign headquarters, a team of pollsters and analysts churned out multiple tranches of data each day on the state of the Democratic race. The sophisticated data operation was supposed to be the candidate’s not-so-secret weapon, giving Bloomberg an almost real-time look at voters’ preferences in […] Read more »
Frozen in Anxiety: How Democratic Leaders Struggled to Confront Bernie Sanders
Late last year a group of first-term House Democrats, anxious over the party’s fractious presidential race, convened a series of discussions intended to spur unity. … That effort was just one in a series of abandoned or ineffective plans to rally the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, and the […] Read more »
Buttigieg and Klobuchar Are Out. What Now?
The sudden withdrawals of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar from the Democratic presidential field sharpen one of the race’s most important remaining questions: How will college-educated white voters split if the contest narrows into a binary choice between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden? One of the most surprising trends of […] Read more »
Buttigieg’s exit is better for Biden than Sanders
Pete Buttigieg’s exit from the presidential race adds another wrinkle to the Democratic contest ahead of Super Tuesday. The exact effects of the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s departure, along with Joe Biden’s blowout victory in South Carolina, are unknowable. Still, it’s pretty clear that Buttigieg getting out likely helps […] Read more »