Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper is among the lesser-known 2020 Democratic candidates competing for a spot on the debate stage and struggling to break through a crowded field. | Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images 2020 Elections ‘Who is real, and who isn’t?’ Pollsters struggle to measure huge 2020 field The Democratic National Committee's debate criteria has put the spotlight on decisions about which candidates to include in surveys.

The logjam of nearly two dozen declared or likely Democratic presidential candidates is overwhelming public pollsters trying to measure the 2020 primary.

New surveys are cramming up to 23 Democrats into their questionnaires after the Democratic National Committee set a low, 1 percent polling threshold to gain admittance into the party’s first primary debates. The miles-long list of candidates has created an unusual set of methodological challenges for pollsters already battling declining engagement with their surveys.


But pollsters say the criteria also put them in a no-win situation: A pollster’s decision about whether to include a candidate or not could be a make-or-break choice for that campaign, especially the lesser-known and first-time White House hopefuls hoping to make the debate stage.

“The main thing standing between a candidate registering 1 percent and 0 percent in any particular poll is each pollster’s decision of whom to include,” said Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “This places an undue editorial burden on public polling outfits.”

“There are 200 names who have filed for the Democratic presidential nomination. We’re obviously not going to list them all,” Murray added. “The question is, who is real, and who isn’t?”

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The size of the candidate field could complicate the poll results and meddle with an already fluid race. Imagine, for a moment, you’re talking on the phone to a pollster. (It’s no small feat for pollsters to get willing respondents on the phone, given the record-low response rates they’re getting for their surveys.)

Now imagine you’re willing to participate in a full, roughly-15-minute interview. (The stats suggest pollsters must dial nearly 7,000 working phone numbers to obtain a 400-voter sample, not including numbers no longer in service.)

Now picture listening to an interviewer, who is reading a laundry list of 23 names and then asking you at the end to choose the one candidate you’d prefer for the Democratic nomination. (Good luck remembering all the names, given that the average Democratic voter in these polls has never heard of half of them.)

After all that, it’s those results that could mean the difference between participating in the first debates, or a campaign that never gets off the ground.

“It’s an odd situation, really, for a poll to end up having a real-world consequence,” said Ann Selzer, who conducts the legendary Iowa Poll for the Des Moines Register, CNN and Mediacom.

Last month, the DNC announced a two-pronged qualification process for the first two debates, sponsored by NBC News and CNN in June and July, respectively. First, there’s the polling criteria: Candidates can make the debate stage if they register 1 percent in three separate polls this year, running up until two weeks out from the debate.

There’s also a campaign-finance threshold — contributions from 65,000 unique donors, geographically distributed — that has opened the door to political newcomers that even some hyper-engaged voters have never heard of.

But the polling criteria could be the final arbiter of which candidates get on the stage. The DNC is capping the field for the first two debates at 20 candidates — divided, randomly, among two back-to-back nights. Candidates who meet both of the polling and campaign-finance thresholds will be ordered by their polling average. If there are more than 20 candidates, the candidates with the lowest polling averages will be chopped.

With roughly three months until the first debate, the imposition of the 1-percent threshold appears unlikely to be a real obstacle for any of the other credible candidates. As of Monday, seven Democrats appear to have qualified for the debate stage after registered at least 1 percent in three polls, according to a POLITICO analysis: Biden, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (Texas) and Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.), Kamala Harris (Calif.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.).

Another handful of candidates have hit 1 percent in at least two polls and are apparently just one more poll away from meeting the DNC’s criteria: South Bend (Ind.) Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) and former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper.

The DNC says it won't confirm any of these calculations but will make an announcement about the slate of participants prior to the first debate.

The DNC’s reliance on public polls to sort out its massive field is coming four years after Republicans deployed a similar system. The criteria varied depending on the media outlet sponsoring each debate, but most of the debates involved the top 10 candidates in a national polling average, with candidates who registered lower participating in a separate TV program for also-rans — often derided as a “kiddie-table” debate.

Pollsters complained back in 2015, too, arguing that the large margins of error in primary polls meant that the results weren’t precise enough to cut the field in that fashion.

The 2020 race presents a different problem: which candidates to include. Most pollsters are choosing to list as many candidates as possible — even at the risk of flooding poll respondents with a long list of names.

Monmouth’s latest poll, released Monday, listed 23 candidates, as did the most recent Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll, released last Saturday. Both polls included entrepreneur Andrew Yang and self-help author Marianne Williamson — two people who have never held public office and were each unknown to roughly four-in-five likely Iowa Democratic caucusgoers in the most recent survey.

“With this responsibility in mind, Monmouth will attempt to be as inclusive as possible in its polling of the Democratic field in these early stages of the campaign,” said Murray, in a statement accompanying Monmouth’s new poll. “In general, we will include any declared candidate who has held federal or statewide office. We will also include those who have shown fundraising ability, such as Andrew Yang, as well as those who may have the potential to register support in early states based on other metrics.”

Added Murray: “These are necessarily judgment calls, but we would rather err on the side of inclusion given the DNC debate criteria.”

Selzer told POLITICO that the decision to list all those candidates in the Iowa Poll was made in conjunction with the survey’s media partners, though she said that there wasn’t “perfect agreement for every particular name.”

In an effort to mitigate the long list of candidates, Selzer said she is asking respondents about the candidates individually prior to the ballot test — for example, respondents are asked whether they view “Joe Biden, former vice president of the United States,” favorably or unfavorably.

Closer to the caucuses, she would do the ballot test first. But now, she said, some voters may like a candidate without being able to pick that candidates name out of the list.

“We feel like this gives us an educated sense of where people are in terms of their first choice or second choice,” said Selzer.

Zach Montellaro contributed to this report.