Harvard-Harris national poll: Sanders 20% M. Obama 17% Warren 15% Clinton 10%

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It is pretty clear that Sanders-Warren wing will decide the nominee & Booker-Cuomo etc have no chance & stature.

This is the best Clinton can do, if she wins the nomination, Sanders supporters will be so frustrated that they will honestly want the Dem party to burn & let Trump run amock & cause ruin - She has no chance of winning the GE - Everyone hates her bar her core base. Clinton lost against Trump & has destroyed the Senate/SC, I don't how you recover from that !

Michelle Obama being here completely spoils the result (Now no1 knows the result without her) - The poll should have been made without her !

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Bernie Sanders has a chance to win the 2020 Democratic nomination, but he has to do well with black and Latino voters first.

Sanders managed to get 43% of the vote in the 2016 primaries while not doing very well with minority voters.  A 43% plurality can easily get you the nomination in a crowded field, so I don't see why Sanders (or Warren, for that matter) couldn't win the nomination even while not actually doing that well among minority voters, depending on the state of the opposition.

46% of the Pledged delegates. In 4 years a new 14-17 year old bloc gets added, putting Sanders over the 50% (without considering all the challenges he had in 2016).

I don't think the Minority thing matters hugely for the GE for Sanders or Warren or Gillibrand or Booker (they are all guaranteed a very good number) , it is a challenge for the Dem Primary. Sanders won HI (the most diverse state), won Natives, Asian Americans & Hispanics in many states but did very poorly African Americans (especially Southern Blacks) - A group where only 3 candidates can trounce him in 2020 - Clinton, Biden & M. Obama. Biden is at this point the only candidate who can make it a close race !

In general, his favorability among the black community remained very high & they just liked Clinton more, but they had a favorable opinion of him!

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It is pretty clear that Sanders-Warren wing will decide the nominee & Booker-Cuomo etc have no chance & stature.

As much as I can't stand Cuomo, I don't think that's clear at all.  Out of everyone on the list, those are probably the 2 with the lowest name recognition.  People don't usually say they'll vote for someone if they don't know who they are or what they stand for.  That's probably also partly why Winfrey and Cuban are so low.  People are like... "okay but why are they running?"  They'll have to answer that question if they actually do.  Actually, I think the worst performers here are Sanders and Clinton.  With the name recognition and campaigns they just ran, their numbers are pretty poor with a lot of people knowing who they are and what they stand for but saying they'd rather vote for a random nobody instead.  

Though I'm skeptical of polls this far out anyway.  This is kind of a joke list to me, and I would have picked "none of the above" if they asked me.

I think the best Cuomo can be is Jeb II ! Booker has received more from Wall Street (add speaking fees) than what Hillary did as a Senator. He supports Charter School, a complete flop in a Dem primary. That drug import vote will stay for him & people are looking at every vote of his in the next 4 years ! He is the bunny of the Sanders' wing - The epitome of all things messed up. Imagine Booker's Super-pac raising 20M from Wall Street in 2020! You have to see the videos of Dore, Kyle & others to see the hatred for this man. That whole Justice Dem to primary happened after the Drug import vote. A fan of Bernie made an ad for them & it has picture of Booker as the only Corporate Dem apart from Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Sanders' numbers are being massively depressed due to the age thing & apprehension if he will be running in 2020 - That is transferring some of his voters to Warren & others. Sanders has a 91% favorability among Clinton's Dem 2016 voters in the last poll, so he is in a good position to get more voters!

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If Sanders runs, he wins. Only Biden could make it a tossup.

He needs to appeal to minorities first. I'm not sure he will.

And yet he campaigned alongside Martin Luther King in the 1960s to fight in favor of African Americans' civil rights and was even arrested for this. Remember that.

This is a lie. He did not "campaign alongside" Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King had no idea who the  Bernie Sanders was. Bernie Sanders was a member of CORE, like every other woke college student in the 60s, and went to the March on Washington. Like Mitch McConnell. He got arrested and paid a $25 fine, which is admirable, but other activists were being tortured in jails.

Bill Clinton once met JFK (which is closer than Bernie Sanders ever got to MLK). If I were to say "Bill Clinton worked with JFK" that would be a lie.

He was an activist. He was not a leader. It was admirable, but there is no need to embellish it, and when people do it (like you just did) it's off-putting and infuriating because it diminishes the actions of actual civil rights leaders. And white northerners embellishing his record is one of the myriad of reasons he got his ass kicked in the south.

He never "campaigned alongside" MLK. To say that he did is completely and utterly false.

AND EVEN IF HE WAS AN ACTUAL LEADER, which he wasn't, saying things like this isn't going to help him win over the African-American community. African-Americans want candidates who will talk specifically about issues their communities face, and not about how similar those issues are to issues white communities face.

He struggled MIGHTILY with African-American voters last year. And I've yet to see any indication that he's increased his popularity among them, especially when he's going to West Virginia to try to win back the WWC. I could be wrong.

He was up against Hillary Clinton & any person from Warren to Cuomo would have done worse. He went to jail while was at college protesting segregation. Ofcourse if that was such a deal clincher, he would have won the nomination. And he went to Mississippi for the Nissan march, he went to Georgia for the Martin Luther King day speech at Atlanta. It is very sad that you are unhappy because he went to WV to speak to white people because obvious they don't matter. This is the same mentality which cost Dems the election & will cost again in 2020.

And he doesn't really need to win Black voters. As a matter of fact, if he retains his earlier vote of 46% pledged delegates, he will win just by the fact that more 14-17 year olds get added & old people die disproportionately more. This is not even counting all the institutional biases he had earlier including the Electability question, the Bandwagon effect where people tend to not waste their votes for a sureshot losing candidate, the debates & so on.

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Voters will be sorely disappointed when their top four choices don't run.

I don’t think most voters think that way.  The people responding to this poll picked these names because they’re the familiar names.  The voters aren’t even thinking about 2020 yet.  It’s just that they were asked to make a choice in this poll, so they did.  Most of the candidates who will actually end up running for president are currently unknown to voters.  But once the campaign starts, the primary voters will most likely be cool with whoever it is who ends up running, and won’t be bummed that Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton aren’t in the race.

Anyway, I'm surprised that Sanders isn't higher. His age is a problem, but almost nobody mentioned it in 2016 and it's not like the other candidates are that young.

I’m not surprised Sanders isn’t higher, simply because this is in line with other polls.  The only other national 2020 primary polls to include Sanders so far are PPP and Rasmussen, and both of them also had Sanders in the 20-25% range.  The lesson is “favorability isn’t the same as support”.  Sanders’s favorability #s among Dems are sky high, but it’s not clear to me that the primary electorate has its heart set on giving him the nomination.

If Sanders runs, he wins. Only Biden could make it a tossup.

If Sanders runs he'll clear the progressive field.

Sanders is just so popular with such a high name recognition it's gonna be impossible to stop him if he runs.

I disagree with all of the above.    As I said to mvd10 above, Sanders is very popular, with high favorability ratings, but favorability isn’t the same as support to be president.  The fact that Sanders is only getting ~20-25% support in all these polls suggests that this is not a Clinton 2016-type situation, where the early polls had her 50 points ahead of everyone else, and she was able to (mostly) clear the field.  A “frontrunner” who is only polling at 20% is not going to clear the field.  I don’t see why, for example, Warren would automatically defer to Sanders, seeing as how she’s not actually that far behind him in these polls.

And not sure why Sanders having high name recognition right now is a point in his favor.  The fact that the other candidates have such low name recognition right now argues all the more for them having room to grow.  They could gain a lot of support once they actually start campaigning.  Now maybe most of them aren’t going to be very good candidates, and thus will be stuck in single digits forever.  But there’s no reason for them to rule themselves out, when they’re still unknown and their ultimate trajectories as candidates remain a question mark.

I do actually think that, in the event that Sanders decides to run, he’ll be a reasonably strong frontrunner, with a pretty strong chance to win (though not as strong as Clinton going into 2016).  But the causality doesn’t work the way some of you seem to think.  *If* Sanders is both in good health and *if* he surveys the landscape and sees a clear path to victory, then he’ll get in.  So if it looks like he’s already in a strong position, then he runs, and has a good chance of winning.  But it’s not obvious that he’ll have such a clear path.

I’m also wondering how long he (and maybe Biden) might stretch out a decision timeline.  Will it be like Biden 2016, where we’ll still be waiting in August 2019 to see if the guy’s going to get in the race?

I agree with the last part of your post a 100%. This will be open & everyone will compete including Warren. She should stay until Super Tuesday i

Aug 2019 won't be a good idea. In 08, the debates started in April itself. I think this time you will see a debate schedule finalized in 2018 itself with debates starting latest by May-June. By April-May, I think people have to start announcing.

Realistically, just after the Mid-terms, everyone serious has to start preparation finalizing the campaign. Last time both Hillary & Bernie were teasing a run in 2016 since 2012 itself & preparing. All that "Presidential Exploratory Committee" stuff & having a campaign infrastructure will start.