After the two-night format of the August debate, I was interested in the single-night format of the September 12th debate. For the first time, the five front runners would be on a single stage trading barbs together, thus giving respondents the chance to evaluate them head to head. It also provided us a chance to run only a single poll for our straw poll to finally see which candidates the politically active center-left and center-right people of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook prefer.

In the previous iteration of our straw poll, Pete Buttigieg was the overwhelming favorite of the first night and Joe Biden and Cory Booker lead a much more divided field on the second night.

The Neoliberal Straw Poll

For the second round of our straw poll, we only conducted polling post-debate, and then compared it to pre- and post-debate polling from the July debate. Despite the split, there should comparability between the September and July polls. Just like the first round of polling, we asked respondents to rank the candidates from 1 (favorite) to 10 (least favorite). People did not have to rank every candidate; when someone failed to rank a candidate, the omission was treated a “vote” for the lowest ranking (10), leading the vote distribution to be skewed there.

We distributed the poll across our social media channels and our internal slack group. In total, 1275 people responded to our poll. This was more people than any of the four polls for the August debates.

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

The Results

Below is the average rank of the candidates in both the July post-debate poll and the September poll. Candidates above the red line saw their rankings improve, while candidates below the red line saw their rankings get worse.

Every candidate fell in the rankings, likely because of the narrowing of the field and the head to head nature of this debate. On average, candidates saw a 1.43-point drop in their average rank, though candidates like Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang, and Bernie Sanders lost less ground than their compatriots.

On the other side of things, Kamala Harris and Julian Castro saw the largest declines, with a 2.82 and a 3.46-point decline respectively. This is consistent with both candidates’ decline in national and early-state polls. Castro’s slide in polling might also be partially attributable to his failed attack on Biden’s age, especially as after the previous debate Castro wasn’t looking nearly as weak. On the other hand, Harris’s slide is wholly consistent with pre- and post-debate polling from July. Her three polls (above) show her trend line beginning to flatten and then reversing completely—the centrist part of her coalition evaporating in real time.

The most consistent performers were Andrew Yang (who lost an average of 0.15 points) and Bernie Sanders (0.09 points). Bernie is still the least favorite candidate of the field, with over 60% of people ranking him last or failing to rank him. Andrew Yang is a much more divisive candidate, with a huge vote spike in the #1 spot interrupting an otherwise negative trend (above). Some neoliberals seem to really like Yang, but the majority of people place him in 8th, 9th, or 10th place.

Pete Buttigieg remains the overwhelming favorite of neoliberals, with more than half of voters placing him 1st, 2nd, or 3rd. Joe Biden was the only other candidate with a similar skew to Buttigieg but remained a distant second.

In this poll, we also saw the rise of X or Bust voting: a full 25% of ballots only voted for a handful of candidates and left the rest blank. I attribute it to people winnowing down the list of candidates that they prefer. If this trend continues, we will need to rethink how to handle and display null votes, to avoid potential data skewing. Either way, another round of polling should provide further insight into how neoliberals rate the candidates.