As I’ve mentioned a few times, we’ve gotten into the survey business, both of the public at large but especially of our own audience, which is a good proxy for center-left and liberal news junkies around the country and also primary voters. We’ve been doing various polling tied to the 2016 presidential race and after the jump I have some numbers that gave me a different take on how to look at the Democratic primary race.
As I said, this is not the public at large but TPM readers. The samples of Sanders, Clinton, and Biden each have at least 2300 qualified respondents. The number of respondents for President Obama is 1459. All were taken in the second half of this week. And again, what interests me about these numbers is that it is not the population at large or even Democrats at large: it’s a center-left demographics which rates very high on ‘influence’ markers. They follow news closely; they converse with people in their social sets about politics frequently, online and off; and they’re disproportionately in professional positions of influence.
Now, there are various things you can draw from these numbers. But the big thing that just jumps right out at me at least is how basically similar attitudes are toward Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders and how different they are from Clinton and Biden.
Overall favorability ranges from a high of 84% for Obama to 68.4% for Clinton. Unsurprisingly these people are all thought pretty highly of by a generally center-left readership. But the difference in intensity of affinity is huge, as Donald Trump might say.
This point may be debatable. But these numbers also suggest to me the way the dynamics of the current race are not only about ideology. After seven years in office, President Obama clearly has a different policy agenda than Bernie Sanders. And Joe Biden might even be to the left of Obama. Who knows? With the exception of Clinton probably being a bit to the right of all of the rest and Sanders clearly to the left of the rest, the fine distinctions are semantic and subjective. But on the general subject of how this slice of high-information center-left and liberal voters feel about these four leaders, the dichotomy couldn’t be more clear.
