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?
