Election Update: Two New Polls Show Biden's Upside Scenario

With a mix of relatively strong and relatively weak polls for each of the major candidates, the top line of our 2020 Democratic primary forecast has been roughly unchanged over the past several days.

In a race without a clear favorite, former Vice President Joe Biden remains the front-runner, with a 39 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates. He’s followed by Sen. Bernie Sanders with a 23 percent chance, Sen. Elizabeth Warren with a 13 percent chance and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg with a 10 percent chance. The chance that no one will win a majority of pledged delegates is 14 percent. All of those figures are within 1 percentage point of when I last wrote about the forecast on Saturday.



The twist, though, is that this time Biden’s strongest new polls — at least, in terms of how much they helped or hurt him in the model — were in Iowa and New Hampshire, whereas he got middling numbers in new polls of Nevada and California (along with a not-particularly-great set of national numbers).

In a Monmouth University poll of Iowa released on Monday, Biden led the pack with 24 percent of the vote, followed by 18 percent for Sanders, 17 percent for Buttigieg and 15 percent for Warren. Meanwhile, an RKM Research and Communications poll of New Hampshire, conducted for Franklin Pierce University and the Boston Herald, had Biden ahead with 26 percent of the vote there, leading Sanders at 22, Warren at 18 and Buttigieg at 7.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-two-new-polls-show-bidens-upside-scenario/