A Change Research poll released this week offers some clues. It showed Biden well ahead of his potential Democratic rivals in South Carolina, which is expected to vote fourth in the Democratic primary process. (The survey was conducted March 31-April 4.) Thirty-two percent of Democrats said they favored Biden, with Bernie Sanders (14 percent) and Kamala Harris (10 percent) the only other candidates in double digits. Of course, that Biden is leading in South Carolina is not surprising — he leads in basically all polls of the 2020 field, nationally and in the early primary states.
But Change Research also conducted a version of the poll with only declared candidates — leaving out Biden and other potential late entrants1 And that showed a much different, more wide-open race. Sanders was in first with 24 percent, and five other candidates were in double digits: Beto O’Rourke (16 percent), Harris (15), Cory Booker (12), Pete Buttigieg (12) and Elizabeth Warren (11 percent). [...]
That said, the difference in results without Biden is interesting a couple of ways. First, even though Sanders is positioning himself as one of the most liberal candidates in the race and Biden is likely to be cast as one of the more conservative ones, it’s not clear that Democratic voters are seeing those two as representative of different ideological poles within the party. According to polling from Morning Consult, Sanders is the second choice for many Biden voters, and vice versa. That Sanders gained 10 percentage points in the Change Research poll when Biden was not included also suggests that some voters are choosing between those two. Again, that finding could simply reflect that Sanders is the only candidate besides Biden who most Democrats are really familiar with. But it’s also worth considering that voters, at least at this stage, either might not know or might not care about the various candidates’ policy differences, which may already be well-known to party activists and journalists.
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