538- High-information voters love Elizabeth Warren -- and not Bernie Sanders [View all]

[DemocratSinceBirth]

Bulletpoint No. 2: High-information voters love Elizabeth Warren — and not Bernie Sanders


In a previous Silver Bulletpoints, I asked whether candidates who are popular among high-education voters, such as Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren, are also popular among high-information voters. There’s no particular advantage to overperforming with college-educated voters; almost 65 percent of voters in the 2016 Democratic primaries did not have a four-year college degree. But doing well with high-information voters is usually a bullish sign. These voters are more likely to judge the candidates on factors beyond name recognition, and so may be leading indicators for how other voters will view the race once they’ve acquired more information. Moreover, high-information voters are more likely to eventually turn out to vote.

Quinnipiac addressed this in their most recent poll, asking Democrats how much attention they’ve been paying to the campaign and breaking out their topline results on that basis. Among voters paying a lot of attention to the campaign, Warren got 15 percent of the vote, and Sanders got just 8 percent. Among voters who are paying little or no attention, however, Warren got just 5 percent of the vote against Sanders’s 28 percent.

Warren, Biden gain ground among high-information voters
Share of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters who supported each candidate, by how much attention they’ve been paying to the election campaign for president

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/maybe-the-moderate-democrats-running-are-more-popular-with-swing-voters/