Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.
Poll of the week
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential announcement wasn’t the only big 2020 news this week: According to our research, 16 Democratic candidates have now qualified for the first two primary debates this summer, counting Biden, who only needed to enter the race to qualify, and Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who was put over the top by a new survey from Reuters/Ipsos. And as a result, author Marianne Williamson has also qualified as a major candidate by FiveThirtyEight’s standards — more on how the two are connected and how she qualified in a moment. (And yes, this means we’ll have a profile on how she could win the Democratic primary next week.)
First, Ryan earned a spot on the debate stage this week by getting support from 1 percent of respondents in that Reuters/Ipsos poll. Earlier this month, he received 1 percent and 2 percent support in polls from Monmouth University and the University of New Hampshire, which is enough to get him a lectern, according to the Democratic National Committee’s rules.
This year, the DNC declared that candidates can qualify for the first two debates by earning at least 1 percent of the vote in three national or early-primary-state polls conducted by qualifying pollsters,1 or by receiving donations from at least 65,000 unique donors, including at least 200 individual donors in at least 20 states. By our count, 16 candidates have now met at least one of the two criteria, and at least six candidates have cleared both the polling and fundraising thresholds.2
Which candidates have made the primary debates?
Democratic presidential candidates or potential candidates, by qualifying criteria for the first two primary debates, as of April 25, 2019
| Qualifies for debates via … | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Candidate | polls | donors | both |
| Pete Buttigieg | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Kamala Harris | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Beto O’Rourke | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bernie Sanders | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Elizabeth Warren | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Andrew Yang | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Joe Biden | ✓ | ||
| Cory Booker | ✓ | ||
| Julian Castro | ✓ | ||
| John Delaney | ✓ | ||
| Kirsten Gillibrand | ✓ | ||
| John Hickenlooper | ✓ | ||
| Jay Inslee | ✓ | ||
| Amy Klobuchar | ✓ | ||
| Tim Ryan | ✓ | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard | ✓ | ||
| Seth Moulton | |||
| Eric Swalwell | |||
| Marianne Williamson | |||
With the first two debates capped at 20 slots each, the stage is quickly filling up. The DNC plans to split up each debate over two consecutive nights to accommodate up to 10 candidates per night; if more than 20 candidates qualify, it will choose qualifiers based on a ranking system that incorporates both thresholds.
Second, because Ryan qualified for the debate stage (he was already a major candidate under FiveThirtyEight’s guidelines), one more person has now entered the ranks of our “major” candidates: Williamson, an author and spiritual adviser who launched her bid back in January. One of our criteria for counting someone as a major candidate relies on Google search traffic relative to the median candidate who has qualified for the debate,3 and Ryan joining the debate group changed the median, which allowed Williamson to meet a sixth criterion for being classed as major in our system.
Any candidate who meets at least six criteria at any time becomes major in our book, and anyone who meets them once can’t lose “major” status. Williamson had already met all four of our criteria related to actively running, plus she had been named as an option in at least half of recent surveys.
How we’re defining “major” presidential primary candidates
Candidates must meet the DNC’s debate qualifications via fundraising or polling OR meet at least six of these 10 criteria …
| How actively the candidate is running | |
|---|---|
| 1. | Has formally begun a campaign (not merely formed an exploratory committee) |
| 2. | Is running to win (not merely to draw attention to an issue) |
| 3. | Has hired at least three full-time staffers (or equivalents) |
| 4. | Is routinely campaigning outside of their home state* |
| What other people think of the candidate | |
| 5. | Is included as a named option in at least half of polls* |
| 6. | Gets at least half as much media coverage as the median debate-qualified candidate* |
| 7. | Receives at least half as much Google search traffic as the median debate-qualified candidate* |
| 8. | Receives at least one endorsement from an endorser FiveThirtyEight is tracking |
| The candidate’s credentials | |
| 9. | Has held any public office (elected or appointed) |
| 10. | Has held a major public office (president, vice president, governor, U.S. Senate, U.S. House, mayor of a city of at least 300,000 people, member of a presidential Cabinet) |
Even though she’s major to us, Williamson does not seem to have qualified for the debate stage yet, as far as we can tell. She hasn’t hit 1 percent in any qualifying polls so far, but she still might be able to reach the donor threshold — as of Thursday afternoon, her campaign website claimed she was about 9,000 donors shy of 65,000. Williamson raised a little over $1.5 million in the first quarter of 2019, but the Federal Election Commission data can’t tell us how many individual donors that money came from.4 We’ll just have to see where things stand in June.
From ABC News:
Meet Marianne Williamson, spiritual guru, friend of Oprah’s, presidential candidate
Other polling bites
- In a survey of 13,000 Americans, Morning Consult found the country is almost evenly split between people who say there is too much prejudice in the country today (52 percent) and those who say there’s too much political correctness (48 percent). But how respondents felt varied quite a bit with their party affiliation. Of those who said there is too much prejudice, 49 percent identified as Democrats while 17 percent identified as Republicans. Conversely, of those who said there is too much political correctness, 46 percent identified as Republicans vs. 18 percent who said they were Democrats.
- A new study from the Pew Research Center found that Twitter users are younger, more educated and more Democratic-leaning than the general public. While the country’s population is split about evenly between those younger than 50 and those 50 or older, 73 percent of adult Twitter users were under 50. And although 31 percent of Americans are college graduates, 42 percent of Twitter users fell into that category. Finally, 52 percent of the country identifies as Democratic or leans toward that party, compared to 60 percent of Twitter users who said the same.
- The Kaiser Family Foundation’s latest health care poll showed that the public remains supportive of “Medicare for All,” which Kaiser defined as a system in which all Americans get health insurance from a government plan: 56 percent of Americans favored Medicare for All, while 38 percent oppose it. That might be encouraging for some Democratic presidential candidates who have been pushing for such a plan, but they may want to proceed cautiously, as the survey also found that a majority of Democrats5 (52 percent) want Congress to focus on improving and protecting the Affordable Care Act rather than on passing a national Medicare for All plan (39 percent).
- A new report from Gallup found that Americans were more stressed and angry than ever in 2018. When asked if they had felt certain emotions “a lot” during the previous day, 55 percent said they had been stressed, 45 percent said they had been worried, and 22 percent said they had been angry. And as it turns out, politics may have influenced some of these emotions: Americans who approved of President Trump were far less likely to be stressed (45 percent) or worried (35 percent) than those who disapproved (62 percent stressed; 51 percent worried).
- The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Higher Education Analytics Center at NORC took a look at American attitudes toward college admissions and found that 38 percent consider the admissions process fair while 36 percent said it was unfair — a roughly even split.
- Another Pew survey found a split in how Democrats and Republicans view Israelis and Palestinians: 77 percent of Republicans held favorable views of Israelis while 57 percent of Democrats felt the same,6 and 32 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of Democrats had favorable opinions of Palestinians. And while 61 percent of Republicans held favorable views of the Israeli government, just 26 percent of Democrats said the same. However, neither party had favorable views of the Palestinian government — only 27 percent of Democrats and 11 percent of Republicans viewed the government favorably.
Trump approval
According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 41.5 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 53.1 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -11.6 points). At this time last week, 42.0 percent approved and 53.0 percent disapproved (for a net approval rating of -11.0 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 42.3 percent and a disapproval rating of 52.8 percent, for a net approval rating of -10.5 points.
Nathaniel Rakich contributed research.