Candidates gain and lose popularity for a variety of reasons during their bids for the presidency. Public opinion is often swayed by both political and personal news stories that either increase trustworthiness or perceived strength of a candidate or call into question a candidate’s integrity or ability to perform their duties as President of the United States.
Here we will examine key campaign events from January 2019 to November 2019, including controversies and endorsements that may have impacted 3 of the frontrunner candidates during their bids for the Democratic Nomination for President in 2020, Former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders. Data on polling performance was obtained from FiveThirtyEight and stories on candidates were found in The New York Times, Vox and Politico.
| Candidate | Minimum Polling % | Maximum Polling % | Average Polling % | Standard Deviation Polling % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joe Biden | 9 | 33 | 27 | 6 |
Lucy Flores, a former assemblywoman in the state of Nevada wrote an essay published in The Cut that detailed her experience at a campaign event in 2014 during her run for Lieutenant governor where Joe Biden smelled her hair and “proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head”. This essay was published less than a month before Vice President Biden announced his campaign for president in April, and it was quickly met with a response from the former VP saying “not once - never – did I believe I acted inappropriately”. Biden acknowledged he had made “expressions of affection” over his career and pledged to listen to any accuser or women who shared their experiences. This news was quickly followed by other women speaking out in early April 2019 and sharing similar accounts of inappropriate or uncomfortable touching by the Vice President.
While the first poll after the essay was published by The Cut only showed a 1 percentage point decrease from 28% to 27% for Biden, the following poll released around the same time as his official announcement of his bid for the presidency showed a drastic decline to only 17%. The negative press he received due to these accusations likely contributed to this drop in support in national polls.
| Poll Date | Polling Percent |
|---|---|
| 2019-03-04 | 28 |
| 2019-04-15 | 27 |
| 2019-04-25 | 17 |
On May 1, 2019, the New York Times ran a story on Joe Biden’s involvement in the firing of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in 2015 that raised questions of a potential conflict of interest. The negotiation that led to Shokin’s firing was touted as a strong performance by Vice President Biden in his foreign policy role while in the White House. The decision to fire Shokin was supported by both the Obama Administration and other Western nations. The prosecutor general was fired for his inability to crack down on Ukraine’s corruption. Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden sat on the board of a natural gas company, Burisma that, according to the New York Times article, was being investigated by Shokin at the time of his firing.
The next poll after this article was published showed the largest gain in polling percentage during the time period covered by these data. After dropping to 17 percent following the announcement of his candidacy, the next poll ending collection on May 20th showed an increase of 16 percentage points to 33 percent overall. While we may have expected this controversy to negatively impact Joe Biden’s polling performance, this surge in the polls may be due to initial momentum following his bid for presidency or push back against the narrative the Trump Administration had been stressing regarding Biden’s role in Ukraine.
This endorsement of Joe Biden by Senator Feinstein comes as somewhat of a slight to her fellow California Senator and candidate for the Democratic nomination, Kamala Harris. This endorsement is even more meaningful considering the current democratic field which includes 5 of Feinstein’s fellow Senators.
There does appear to be some momentum following this October announcement, although it is short-lived. According to polls only a week later, Biden has returned to polling at 32%, one of the highest numbers during his presidential bid. But in less than a month following this endorsement, he experienced a 9 percentage point decline in the polls.
| Candidate | Minimum Polling % | Maximum Polling % | Average Polling % | Standard Deviation Polling % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Elizabeth Warren | 2 | 28 | 14 | 7 |
Warren received a lot of backlash for her handling of her claims of Native American ancestry in 2018 when she took and publicly released ancestry results after challenging Trump to pay her one million dollars for the results. While she had previously apologized for this, during an August 19th Forum in Iowa in front of a majority Native American crowd, she again apologized for her actions and announced her plans to help Native American communities with housing and addressing the opioid crisis.
The polls following this meeting showed an initial drop in the polls, down 2.5 percentage points to 17.5% and remained lower for 2 consecutive polls. While this drop was small in comparison to the gains Senator Warren had been making in the polls, it may be indicative of some voters’ hesitation to back a candidate whose claims of ancestry have long been a controversy and in previous elections had been used against her by her opponents. This could be seen as a weakness against President Donald Trump in the general election.
Elizabeth Warren received a key endorsement from a political group call Working Families Party on Spetember 18th, which works closely with unions, activists and organizations across the country. This endorsement is made even more meaningful to the Warren campaign because the group had previously endorsed one of her opponents, Bernie Sanders during the 2016 election.
In the polls following this announcement, Warren saw a 9 percentage point increase in the polls and reached her highest polling percent to date at 28%. It is hard to distinguish whether this endorsement was a factor in her upward trajectory due to her relatively consistent increase in popularity since January, but this was the largest gain by the candidate over the months of January to November and could signify an important turning point in her campaign.
Elizabeth Warren has experienced one of the largest gains in popularity during the 2020 Democratic Primary on her progressive agenda including free college, Medicare for All and a wealth tax, but an article published by the New York Times on her past work as a lawyer for corporations has cast some doubt on her authenticity. During her time as a corporate lawyer, a job she did while also teaching at Harvard Law School, she earned hundreds of thousands of dollars defending companies like LTV Steel who believed they should not have to pay towards a health fund for retired miners after they had sold off of their mines.
It is hard to tell how this news affected her polling as it came just days before the last poll on November 3, 2019, but in the short-term it appears this did not have much of an impact on her performance, with a slight increase in polling percent from 22% to 23%.
| Candidate | Minimum Polling % | Maximum Polling % | Average Polling % | Standard Deviation Polling % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bernie Sanders | 4 | 28.5 | 18 | 5 |
Senator Sanders has long been an advocate for working class Americans and making the 1% pay their “fair share of taxes” but in 2016 following his last bid for presidency, Bernie became one of those millionaires himself, due to royalties from his best-selling book “Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In”. Around the same time Politico released this story, Former Vice President Joe Biden also entered the crowded Democratic field for president.
It is difficult to determine the impact these two events had separately on the Sanders campaign, but following both the article and Biden’s announcement, Sanders dropped to his lowest polling percent recorded since January of 2019. This could be due to either the addition of a popular candidate into the race at this time or feelings of mistrust by the public as Bernie Sanders becomes more aligned financially with the wealthy than the working class.
Reports of Bernie Sanders’ heart attack were released on October 4, 2019 after two days in the hospital following the insertion of stints in a blocked artery. Sanders, while seen shooting hoops on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, is often questioned on his ability to undertake the job of President of the United States due to his age. Bernie sanders at age 78 is the oldest candidate in the race and this news may have confirmed doubts of his fitness for office.
The endorsements by Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, 3 of the 4 members of Congress referred to as “The Squad”, who have quickly become the faces of the progressive wing of the democratic party, was a huge win for the Senator from Vermont. These endorsements occurred back-to-back and shortly after Sanders came back to the campaign trail following his heart attack.
Polls after Sanders heart attack showed an increase after a period of decline. “Squad” endorsements occurred only 2 weeks following this event and was again followed by a moderate increase in polling performance which appears to be a part of a steady increase in polling performance for the Senator in recent months. It is difficult to tell which of these events may have had a larger impact on the Senator’s polls, but an increase after his heart attack was unexpected and further exploration into measures of likeability or trust may help to explain this.
It is well known that the number of endorsements a candidate has from other politicians, the greater their chances of winning the primary and going on to the general election. In fact, the candidate with the greatest number of endorsements prior to the first primary votes in the Iowa caucus, has historically gone one to receive the nomination. This may be true for a more traditional democratic primary field, but with the sheer number of candidates and high profile bids for office, this equation becomes more complicated. Here we compare current polling standings just a few months before the Iowa caucus with the number of endorsements for each candidate. Endorsements only include governors and members of Congress.
Of the top three candidates in the most recent poll on November 3, 2019, only Joe Biden has a large number of endorsements. Both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have comparably low numbers of endorsements but are polling around 20%. For candidates who are near the bottom of the pack, between 1% and 5%, the relationship between the number of endorsement and polling performance appear to be consistent with previous primary elections with the exception of Kamala Harris.