DU Primaries Report, April 2019: Let's Get This Party Started! [View all]

[EarlG]

We've been keeping a log of the candidates' support on DU since March 22. The numbers are logged on Mondays and Fridays, and we plan to provide an update on the last Monday or Friday of the month. That's today! So here's the first update.

How the Candidate Rankings board works

First, since we haven't actually explained the inner workings of the Candidate Rankings board, here's a quick primer:

• Displayed percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number, so a candidate displayed at (for example) 10% will have an actual percentage in the range of 9.50% to 10.49%.


• The exception to this is candidates below 0.5% -- they are still displayed at 1% (to indicate that they have at least some support on DU). FWIW, there are currently no candidates with zero supporters.


• If two candidates' whole number percentages are equal, the one with the higher actual percentage will be displayed first.

How the rankings have changed over time

By logging the candidates' support twice a week, we can create graphs of how their support has changed over time. Although we are logging and graphing all the candidates, for clarity in this report we've decided to only include candidates who are polling at more than 1% actual support. Currently, there are eight candidates who fit that criteria. They are (in alphabetical order): Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Jay Inslee, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O'Rourke, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.


Candidates above 1% actual support, including Undecided



Here you can see how Undecided supporters are slowly coming off the fence over the month of April. Undecided started at 48.42% on March 22, and has declined to 40.69% by today. Of note is that whenever candidates have experienced a bump in support for whatever reason, the bump has mostly drawn from Undecideds coming off the fence, as opposed to DUers switching support from one candidate to another.


Candidates above 1% actual support, excluding Undecided



By removing Undecided from the graph, we get a clearer picture of how the top candidates have moved over time.

Inslee, Klobuchar, O'Rourke, and Sanders have remained quite stable over the month of April. Inslee began the month at 2.48% and ends it at 2.00%. Klobuchar began at 1.15% and ends at 1.00%. O'Rourke began at 3.51% and ends at 2.78%, and Sanders began at 7.8% and ends at 7.96%.

Of those four candidates, O'Rourke has suffered the largest decline in support, starting strong when he announced his candidacy, but his share of support has been slowly bleeding week after week since then as new supporters have not been flocking to his cause. Meanwhile Sanders is the only candidate of the four to have increased his percentage over the month of April.

The other four candidates have seen a lot more movement. Harris was the number one candidate on DU for a long time, but her percentage of support has steadily declined since day one, as other candidates have come into the mix. She began April at 13.97%, and has now declined to 10.59%, although it's worth noting that she held onto the number one spot all the way up until last week, when she was finally overtaken by Joe Biden.

The current number one candidate, Joe Biden, has seen two significant bumps in support. The first came near the beginning of April as the media focused on stories alleging that he touched people inappropriately. The backlash to this reporting gave Biden a boost on DU and he increased his support from 8.32% on April 1 to 10.21% on April 8. His second, larger bump came over the past week when he officially announced his candidacy. That has pushed Biden up into first place with a significant jump from 9.54% on April 21 to 13.25% on April 29.

Pete Buttigieg saw the greatest overall increase in support since March 22, beginning at 3.82% and rocketing all the way up to 11.57% on April 19 as he began to garner national attention. (Buttigieg did draw some support from Biden between April 12 and April 19 as Biden's "backlash bump" faded slightly.) But does Mayor Pete have staying power? Since topping out at 11.57% and reaching second place in the rankings, Buttigieg has declined to 9.44% today and could be overtaken by Elizabeth Warren for third place at any moment.

Speaking of Warren, she appeared to be trending along the same lines as Inslee, Klobuchar, O'Rourke, and Sanders, only climbing from 5.83% on March 22 to 6.29% on April 19. But she has seen a spectacular rise since then, climbing three points to 9.29% today. We suspect that this increase in support on DU was due to her becoming the first candidate to officially call for Trump's impeachment following the Mueller report.

So that's where we stand so far. Obviously none of this is particularly scientific and it's not meant to replace or compete with actual real polls being done out there in the real world, but we do think it's been really interesting to track how DUers' preferences are changing over time. We'll be doing this again at the end of each month as long as the primaries are going on. Thanks for reading!