There's A Better Case For A Top 2 Than A Top 3 [View all]

[brooklynite]

Before last week’s debate, I argued that there was a lot of ambiguity as to who belonged in the top tier in the Democratic primary. Depending on which factors you emphasized, the top group could plausibly consist of any number of candidates from one (Joe Biden) to five (Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg).

The Houston debate didn’t upend the campaign overnight; polls since the debate don’t show huge movement. You can, of course, find big swings for individual candidates in individual polls if you’re willing to cherry-pick, but you shouldn’t do that.

The post-debate polls do, however, reinforce some trends that were already in the works before:
- They tend to argue for the presence of a top two (Biden and Warren) as opposed to a top three (Biden, Warren and Sanders), especially if you look at polls of Iowa.
- They make it awfully hard to argue that Harris belongs in the top tier. (I recently argued that Harris did belong in the top tier, so put that take in the “didn’t age well” bucket, at least for now.)

Meanwhile, a new trend since the debate is that several of the lower-tier candidates, such as Amy Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke, are showing slightly livelier numbers, although we’re still only talking the low-to-mid single digits.