There is a long history and strong contemporary precedent of conducting straw polls during the presidential primary process. MoveOn’s regular straw poll receives media attention and can be used as an effective proxy for seeing where the activists in the Democratic Party are leaning at any one time. Meanwhile, in conservative politics, we have the CPAC straw poll; showing us who the activists in the GOP prefer before the primary kicks into gear.

Sadly, whilst the ideological poles are well-covered, there still isn’t a good indicator of where those on the center-left and center-right sit during primary season.

Neoliberal Straw Poll

Within The Neoliberal Project and our sphere of friends, there is also a strong variety of opinion on the topic of who the best nominee would be for the Democratic nomination. I can quickly think of at least one person in our orbit, respectively, who is publicly behind Beto O’Rourke, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang, John Delaney, or Elizabeth Warren.

To figure out who our community prefers and help untangle the heterodox nature of ‘centrist’ opinion on the Democratic primary, we conducted a series of polls before and after the July democratic debates on 26 July and 27 July 2019.

Polls conducted by traditional polling outfits give respondents a long series of candidates, asking them to choose their favorite candidate. Further, due to the sheer size of the field, many polling groups are now also asking people for their second-choice candidate in order to capture a wider preference.

This works okay for phone-based polling, but since we are conducting our polling on the internet in an uncontrolled way, we decided to use other methods.

In each poll we asked people to rank the candidates in their preference order from 1 (favorite) to 10 (least favorite). This forces people to make trade-offs between candidates and gives a deeper picture of who would be someone’s 2nd, 3rd, and so on choice.

People did not have to rank every candidate; when someone failed to rank a candidate, we treated the omission as a “vote” for the lowest ranking (10).

The Results

We distributed the poll on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and our internal Slack. In total, we had 2752 responses. The number of responses to each poll broken down by night and time can be seen in the table below.

Night 1 had more responses than Night 2. Both nights saw a drop-off in responses after the debate.

Night Before After 1 1022 783 2 481 466

To aggregate the responses, we calculated the average ranking of each candidate and then compared this average to the other candidates.

Here is the average rank of the candidates broken down by the night that they appeared on, before and after the debate aired. Candidates above the red line saw their rankings improve, while candidates below the red line saw their rankings get worse.

The candidate with the best score between the two nights was Pete Buttigieg. His average rank was about a 3, despite a slight drop-off in favourability post-debate.

This post-debate slide was common for all of the candidates that scored the best; conversely, candidates that were, on average, ranked at the bottom of people’s ballots saw their rankings improve after the debate.

It is unclear whether this trend is from troll voting or a genuine reflection in opinion. However, if trolling was minimal, it seems that Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, and Marianne Williamson had the strongest debate performances. On the other hand, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and Kamala Harris had the most dramatic declines.

On Night 1, Pete Buttigieg was the undisputed favorite. Night 2’s results, however, were much more ambiguous. Cory Booker, Joe Biden, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, and, to a lesser extent, Jay Inslee, all fared similarly.

Data Deep Dive

Moving away from aggregate analysis, looking at the distribution of votes shows a more nuanced picture of the dataset.

Does it skew in one direction or another? Is it unimodal or bimodal? Sure, we could look at the standard deviations and pretend we are in stats class, but graphs are more fun.

I made graphs for each poll and for each candidate, and I have selected some to showcase here. While I can’t show them all, those not included in this article are on GitHub for you to look through.

The Biggest Decliner

The most dramatic decline of the two nights was from Kamala Harris. In her pre-debate rankings, you can see the leftward skew of the data with a sharp downward slope as more people rank her higher on their ballots.

However, in her post-debate poll the skew of her rankings disappears and the slope almost flattens. Kamala Harris also had a spike in the number of people who either ranked her at the bottom of their ballot or failed to give her a ranking. This is true for nearly every candidate.

The Biggest Improver

The most dramatic improvement of the two sets of polls was from Tulsi Gabbard. She was almost universally disliked among Neoliberals pre-debate with close to 70% of voters ranking her in last place or failing to rank her at all.

She was still the most disliked candidate of the two nights post-debate, but, due to either bot/troll voting or strong debate performance, people ranked her higher on their ballots post-debate.

Bernie Bounce: No Trolls

Bernie Sanders experienced something similar to Tulsi Gabbard in the post-debate poll, with him seeing a sizable improvement post-debate.

This cements my assumption that there was a non-zero number of troll votes in our poll: before the debate there is very little incentive to spike polls, but after the debate, people want to prove that their favored candidate “won” the debate so the incentives increase.

It is also worth noting that posters from 4chan and Reddit, in a bid to get journalists to write about their favorite candidates, targeted online polls to give Andrew Yang, Bill de Blasio, and Tulsi Gabbard a boost.

Sticky Opinions

While Kamala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard, and Bernie Sanders saw dramatic changes, the majority of the candidates saw very little change between their pre and post-debate numbers.This is likely because people’s opinions are “sticky” and resistant to radical change.

At most, we see candidates moving from 4th to 5th, or 2nd to 1st in the average person’s ballot, with there having been no evidence of a sea-change in opinion for any one candidate due to the debates. 50% of candidates saw their average position change by half a place or less and only 20% of the candidates saw a change of 1 or more positions.

The Neoliberal Top 3’s

Finally, in true presidential primary poll fashion, here are the top three post-debate candidates from each night according to the data:

Night 1:

1st – Pete Buttigieg

2nd – Elizabeth Warren

3rd – Beto O’Rourke

Night 2:

1st – Joe Biden/Cory Booker (tie)

2nd – Julian Castro

An honorable mention to Jay Inslee; who had the most consistent rankings of the two nights.

[The full dataset can be found on GitHub here in both the raw and recoded form. The python code that I used for the recording can be found in the Src folder. If you make a data visualization with the dataset, or if you find a signal buried in all the noise, please tag us on Twitter (@ne0liberal). We are interested to see what people make of it.]