By Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee)

As the next Democratic debate gets underway, we present new data on how voters feel about each of the candidates remaining in the primary, and how those voters might shift depending on the candidates they currently favor and disfavor. While Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren currently leads the pack, we also find that she is the most popular second-choice candidate for voters who currently support other front-runners. Unlike past surveys, which found that supporters of this or that candidate tend to approve of Democrats across the board, we’re now finding significant variation in how supporters of each candidate feel about the other candidates. Although we don’t find clean “lanes” we do find that supporters do see ideological differences among candidates. For instance, unlike some pollsters, we find that the second place choice of Sanders supporters is Warren, not Biden, suggesting that voters do see the two candidates as ideologically similar.

As part of the survey, we asked voters to report who they were considering voting for in the upcoming Democratic primary or caucus in their state. Specifically, we asked,

Thinking about the 2020 Democratic presidential (primary or caucus) in your state, which candidate or candidates are you considering voting for? Select all that apply.

With voters selecting as many candidates as they were considering voting or caucusing for. After that item, voters who reported they were considering more than one candidate were asked to rank their candidates from most preferred to least preferred. To prevent the exercise from being too burdensome, we allowed respondents to rank up to five candidates they had selected. Fully 98 percent of respondents had at least one preference, and 82 percent had at least two preferences, but after that, the share of voters with third place, fourth place, etc., candidates drops off quickly. As such, we focus here on the first and second place choices by voters in our sample.

The following table shows how voters rank their second choice candidates. The table reads from left to right: For example, 8 percent of Biden voters say their second choice is South Bend, Indiana mayor Petet Buttigieg, 4 percent say their second choice is Senator Kamala Harris, and so on. About 33 percent of Biden voters have no second choice, as indicated by the very rightmost column, and about 10 percent prefer one of the other candidates not included in the table, as indicated by the “Other” column.