With the recent news that this month’s Democratic debate will feature twelve candidates on a single stage, it’s understandable that both the media, the DNC, and the general public seem eager to narrow the field of candidates. There are a lot of different opinions floating around about the best way to do this, but it seems to me that most of them are weighing factors like endorsements, current polling, and current media angles more heavily than the two factors that, in my view, matter the most: polling trends and fundraising (both total fundraising and trends). And if we go by those numbers, a clear ‘top tier’ emerges—and it’s not just Warren and Biden. If we’re considering all five candidates who are currently qualified for November, we also have to consider Andrew Yang. Here’s how the media has tried to portray the 2020 race over the past few months—and what they’ve missed.
In the summer, during Kamala Harris’s swift rise, the race was characterized as a four or five-person race— this piece from early August said “the surveys across different polling companies and in fact most primary states have been pretty consistent for several months: This is a four-person race among Biden, Sanders, Warren, and Harris, and maybe Pete Buttigieg.” Now, Buttigieg is consistently polling above Harris (and occasionally above Sanders in early states) and will replace Harris in the podium order in the upcoming October debate.
But in September, the media became less and less interested in a four or five-person race. In early September, when Elizabeth Warren began approaching Bernie Sanders in the polls, the field began to be called a “three-person race.” Soon after, in mid-September, when Elizabeth Warren began nearing or beating Joe Biden in the polls, there was another a rush to label the 2020 Democratic contest as down to just two candidates.
Now it’s October, and that argument doesn’t work quite as well. Despite spending the last few weeks of the quarter fundraising, Biden came in at a dismal fourth in fundraising, below Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg. So is it back to a four-person race? Well, I would argue that, if we’re going to include Buttigieg, we have to include Harris, who is polling close to where he is, qualified for the November debates as quickly as he did, and, although she raised less than him, didn’t experience a dip in donations from Q2 to Q3 the way he and Biden have.
The media seems comfortable with this argument as well—the latest trend has been to focus on the five candidates who have qualified for November’s debate. But there’s still over a month for qualifying polls to come out and three candidates already have three of the four polls needed. So the media, when reporting these Q3 numbers and generally speaking about the race, has begun to acknowledge that if it’s not a two-person race, it’s probably closer to a six-person race. Only one candidate who hasn’t qualified yet is really still in the running. He’s definitely worth including in the conversation, and outlets like MSNBC and CNN have been featuring him with the frontrunners. Although this candidate is polling below the top five, he’s significantly improved in his fundraising over last quarter, and is only one poll away from qualifying for the next debate. That’s right, it’s… Cory Booker?
Wait. That can’t be right. Isn’t he polling at less than 2% nationally? Didn’t he only raise half of what Harris did ($6 million to her $11.6 million), and wasn’t $2 million of that only after a last-ditch fundraising effort where he said he was ten days away from having to drop out?
And isn’t there another candidate who is actually polling close to Harris, and who raised 86% of what Harris did (aka 66% of what Biden did)? A candidate who is actually trending up in donations (unlike Harris, Biden, and Buttigieg), and up in the polls (unlike Harris, Biden, and Booker)? That’s right, Andrew Yang is polling at 3.5% nationally and raised $10 million this quarter—and CNN and MSNBC are rightly getting called out for pretending he doesn’t exist.
But this isn’t just about one graphic—Cory Booker is currently ranked fourth in weekly news coverage, despite polling at eighth and fundraising at seventh. It’s not just Yang who’s missing out—Harris and Buttigieg are also polling and fundraising better than Booker but getting covered less. This isn’t to say Booker should be doing anything differently—but that the media needs to realign its focus.
As a fellow Asian-American education entrepreneur, I’ll admit that I may be paying closer attention to Andrew Yang than I would otherwise. But I don’t think you have to be particularly invested in him as a candidate to notice the disparities that are happening here. In fact, I think it’s precisely because I’m not particularly entrenched in politics that I’m noticing this while long-standing analysts are still getting their feathers ruffled imagining that a mayor or an entrepreneur could be polling higher than an established senator, keeping a closer eye on the ‘endorsement primary’ than the actual primary. So as a math enthusiast who looked at the polls and the fundraising and can see whose numbers are going up and whose are going down—Yang’s numbers are going up quickly.
