Past experience shows time and time again that polls about candidates at this point of the election cycle are next to meaningless as predictors of the outcome. What do the people who are putting their money on the line think are the chances that a candidate will be nominated? Such people may have better information or insight on how the nominating process might play out.
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| The smart-money front-runner |
Sen. Warren is now the clear front-runner in the betting markets for the Dem nomination (with a 37% chance, to Biden's 23% and Bernie's 12%). I'm not surprised by this at all; indeed, I probably should have gone on record earlier as saying that Warren seems to be the "best" fit for the '20 Dem party. [Edit: well, I did make this point in person to at least one individual several months back; the response was: "she's an idiot." Well, this is the '20 Dem Party we're talking about here, so the bar is lower than ever, with lots of Kool-Aid being consumed. Nonetheless, I don't agree that she is an idiot, exactly....] The party is lunging well to the left, and her rhetoric is a good match. She demagogues pretty well about all those "fairness"-values. She's a woman, and sexism favoring women is acceptable to many of today's Demo rats. She has a "likeability" factor many of the other candidates don't have as much of. Her "Pocahantas" baggage is not all that serious by today's standards. (I mean, after all, the sitting president has personality/temperament baggage that leads to calling people names, such as "Pocahontas.") Anyone not drinking right-wing Kool-Aid can tell the difference between her wrongly thinking she had Amerind ancestry and her knowingly lying that she did.
Warren hasn't embraced that toxic word "socialism" (and outside of leftist Kool-Aid-drinking districts, it is toxic); in fact she has said that she is a "capitalist to the core" but says the D.C. crony structure needs to be reformed in the direction of "fairness." She has a life story indicating lots of grit and persistence. (Yes, "she persisted.")
Warren's shameful/disgraceful Brett Kavanaugh baggage (Swetnick was a credible accuser, eh? let's hear more about that...) doesn't set her apart from the other leading '20 candidates, since they, too, got in on the shameful/disgraceful act (as demonstrated at the preceding link) and the Demo rat primary voters probably find the smearing of Kavanaugh to be normal, acceptable, imperative, etc. So while this may affect her general-election electability, it wouldn't have any affect on her chances of getting the nomination.
Given the pathological identity-politics ethos of today's Dems, Warren has an edge over Biden and Sanders, the old white men. (Well, they're older than she is by a few years.) With two otherwise equally qualified candidates, they'll go with the woman or the person of color over the white guy. Biden is facing fitness questions, for good reason. Sanders has the "socialism" toxicity even though he and Warren are probably not far apart policy-wise. Again, such a high degree of similarity works in the favor of the woman. Plus, many Dem primary voters will look at general-election electability and find Sanders a poor choice (given the Warren alternative) to put against Trump. Scumbag Harris would face electability issues as well, not the least of which would be her predictable phoniness. (She's a rather distant fourth in the betting markets now, with a 7% chance of nomination. This is noteworthy for a party that has pathological identity-politics issues; she must be really objectionable even to many Dems. Maybe they didn't like how she recklessly smeared Biden over race.)
Yang (5%) and Buttigieg (4%) are not known-enough (whether to me, to the general public, or to the betting market participants) for anyone to assign all that high a probability of either one of them being nominated. For all anyone knows, they are in fact the strongest of the remaining candidates on the merits - hence their non-negligible betting market chances - but there's simply too much uncertainty there. Warren is well-known and her policy positions pretty well worked out. As probabilities go, it just makes sense that she is far out ahead of these two.
After Yang and Buttigieg the betting markets are putting money on Crooked Hillary (3.5%), as though (there is a small chance that) Dem voters would try her again against Trump (a matchup I wrote about at length shortly before the '16 election) and expect a different outcome. And HRC hasn't even declared intentions to run. And barring some disaster for Warren, why would Dems go with HRC over Warren? The candidates after HRC have pretty small percentages in the betting markets; the only other candidate with at least 2% is Booker. I wouldn't dismiss Booker, and it makes sense to ask why Dem voters aren't enthusiastic about him. Perhaps another element I've yet to mention comes into play: age or accumulated life experience. For a younger candidate to overcome such obstacles, things like exceptional smarts (for sifting and integrating information) or charisma would have to compensate. And with Obama the Dems already got their president fitting this description. Booker just doesn't seem to compare all that strongly here. But I wouldn't be surprised to see him surge in the polls in the coming months as primary voters "try out" the options available (before usually tiring of this or that option). The betting market participants have already taken this probable surge or mini-surge into account, of course.
Of course, all this is about the best fit for the nomination, not for a general election win. Warren appears to have the best combination of leftist policy and chances of winning against Trump, both being the key considerations for primary voters.
