Democratic primaries 2020
Who is ahead in the Democratic primary race?

TWENTY-EIGHT candidates have thrown their hat into the ring for the Democrats’ presidential nominating contest in 2020. This field, the largest ever, includes United States senators and House representatives, mayors, entrepreneurs and even a self-help guru. Some candidates have already withdrawn. Those who remain are engaged in a battle for the future of the party. This portal will help you keep track of who is winning and who is losing and, perhaps more interestingly, why.

The main differences between the candidates concern government policy. Liberal candidates, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, have embraced ambitious spending programmes to provide universal health care, increase access to higher education and deal with America’s worsening housing crisis. More moderate candidates, such as Joe Biden, have argued that some of these proposals are impractical. They have taken stances that appear more pragmatic given that only one-third of Americans call themselves liberals, according to polling provided to The Economist by YouGov, our pollster, and that Republicans will probably retain control of the Senate after 2020. But the primary is still anyone’s to win.

Here you will find our estimate of each candidate’s performance in all high-quality, national public opinion polls conducted so far as well as the probability of victory inferred from political betting. You will also find data from YouGov, breaking down support for each candidate by demographic group. Under “Candidates” you will find further demographic data for each contender.

Above, we have calculated support for each candidate by aggregating publicly available, high-quality opinion polls. We include only surveys from pollsters who conduct their interviews over the phone with a live interviewer—rather than with automated machine recording—or that use rigorous and well-documented online methods.

Date	Pollster	Joe Biden	Bernie Sanders		Margin of error
Apr 05–07	YouGov	49%	28%	–	±4%
Mar 30–Apr 05	Morning Consult	61%	36%	–	±1%
Mar 29–31	YouGov	47%	34%	–	±4%
Mar 23–29	Morning Consult	61%	36%	–	±1%
Mar 22–25	ABC News/Washington Post	55%	39%	–	±5%
Mar 20–24	Echelon Insights	66%	29%	–	±5%
Mar 22–24	YouGov	47%	34%	–	±4%
Mar 18–24	Ipsos	43%	28%	–	±2%
Mar 16–22	Morning Consult	60%	36%	–	±1%
Mar 15–17	YouGov	48%	32%	–	±4%

Breaking down support by demographic group gives an indication of why the contenders are doing well, or poorly, in the national numbers. We have crunched those numbers for the most important demographic categories: race, age, sex, education and ideology. Interested in the strength of Joe Biden’s support among African-Americans? Here’s where to look.

Methodology

We estimate support for each candidate using a statistical method that combines Bayesian statistics with dynamic logistic regression and a Dirichlet distribution (forgive the jargon). The model aggregates polls over the course of the campaign, putting more weight on polls conducted recently, less on those with small sample sizes and accounting for “house effects”—the tendency for some polling firms to over- or underestimate support for certain candidates. We exclude polling firms that do not use rigorous methods. In the past, surveys conducted over the phone with a live interviewer or with online survey-takers that use well-thought-out methodologies have been more reliable than other methods.

We have produced demographic crosstabs using the past four weeks of polling data from YouGov, a polling firm. Analyses of voters’ preferences beyond their first-choice for the nomination come from the same micro-data, but our time-series graphs rely on data from the entire campaign.

Richard Ojeda, a West Virginia state senator, also ran for the presidency but he dropped out of consideration on January 25th 2019. He is not included in this interactive.

Sources: FiveThirtyEight; YouGov; PredictIt; The Economist

The Trust Project