Useless poll. Feinstein and de Leon aren't the only ones running and de Leon only is at 16% because he's winning some Republicans, which won't happen when people see the full list of candidates.
My thoughts exactly. A more useful poll would include the top 3 Dems and at least some Republicans, although admittedly it is difficult to extract candidates worth polling from the GOP field. What would you think of this list?:
- Feinstein (D)
- De Leon (D)
- Hartson (D)
- De La Fuente (R)
- Cruz (R)
Eisner (NPP)
It's Eisen.
That's a very good point. It's really hard for the pollsters to try to pick some Republicans out of the current field. Wiki says that there are: 5 people without a listed occupation, an author, a veteran (not veterinarian), 2 perennial candidates, 2 business(wo)men, a scientist, and a white nationalist/alt-right activist. None of them aside from Rocky De La Fuente have a wiki page and he only has that because it seems like running for office is his new hobby post retirement. None of these candidates are anybody important. The state party couldn't even drag some old assemblyman out of retirement.
It's not really that great that none of the pollsters are listing any Republicans (aside from that one poll), but none of these people have been doing much. Hell, I'd probably list Alison Hartson ahead of most of these Republicans.
Being on Atlas, we're more aware of these candidates than probably 95% of the people on the street. Most of them have probably heard of Feinstein and a fair number of them have probably heard of De Leon, but I would doubt that anyone could name a Republican running for Senate in California. Hell, I couldn't name any of them and I looked at the wiki page 5 minutes ago. If the pollsters really wanted to mess with the election, they could all choose one Republican and run them as the Republican option in the polls. I'd bet that candidate would do better than most if not all the other Republicans in the field.
There is the route of asking literally every single name, but when most of them are nobodies, I'm not sure how effective that would be. Hell, even Eisen, who I've supported on and off, who is a professor at a UC school has basically no name recognition.
In most elections, there are going to be some people running that get maybe half a percent.
Look at the 2016 Senate Primary in CA. The pollsters picked three of the numerous Republicans and ran them. Del Beccaro, Sundheim, and Unz. Unz was polling at about 5% and got 1.2%. Sundheim was polling at about 5% and got 7.8%. Del Beccaro was polling at about 8% and got 4.3%. Phil Wyman, who is not listed in any polling got 4.7% and Greg Conlon, who was not listed in any polling got 3.1%.
Polling for these guys was kind of a crapshoot. So, maybe my bet about pollsters being able to back one might not be accurate. IDK. None of them raised more than $532k compared to Sanchez's $3.2 million and Feinstein's $9.7 million.
Basically it's hard to pick someone to poll for out of a bunch of nobodies.
