National:
Kos Poll: A national RV poll for Daily Kos by Civiqs finds Trump within 2 points of 4 Democratic candidates. The poll’s crosstabs are a little wonky (Trump is doing surprisingly well with young voters and black voters in the poll), but it’s worth noting that unlike most other polls Joe Biden isn’t doing any better than the other candidates vs. Trump. Considering that’s his main selling point to Democratic primary voters, that has to be a concern for him.
2020 D Primary AK/HI: Alaska and Hawaii have both changed their party primaries to RCV. In essence, any candidate who fails to reach the 15% threshold necessary to be eligible for delegates will see their votes bumped to their 2nd-choice candidates, so on and so forth until every Democrat left has at least 15%. This means it’s basically impossible for a narrow frontrunner to all-but sweep a state’s delegates against widely–divided opposition (as could happen in some of these national polls where Biden and Sanders are the only ones even close to the 15% cutoff), and its interesting to see if other, more delegate-rich states follow suit given the current clown-car-ness of the D field.
2020 D Primary Pete: Pete Buttigieg (Pronounced either “Boot-a-judge” or “Boot-edge-edge” apparently) has formally announced his presidential run. Buttigieg, the smiling, youthful, gay mayor of a city most Americans will claim to have heard of, has gotten some traction lately, mostly on the strength of his solid charisma and his optimistic-outsider aura that historically resonates well with Democratic primary voters. It remains to be seen if his light political resume and lack of national spotlight experience will hinder his run, but for now he seems to have mostly supplemented Beto’s spot as the young white dude candidate in the race.
2020 D Primary PA: A Morning Consultant poll of Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary finds Biden leading with 28%, Sanders trailing with 16%, Warren and Harris each at 8%, and everyone else at 4% or below. While the poll shows unusual weakness for Sanders in the state, we have to ask whether or not Biden should be polling at higher than 28% in which is essentially his home state while the nominal front-runner of the race.
2020 D Primary Gillibrand: Kristen Gillibrand has raised about $3 Million for her presidential campaign so far, decidedly on the lower end of the Democratic candidates running right now. Honestly I’m surprised she’s even gotten that much given that her polling seems to be at asterisk level nationwide and her lack of anything resembling a clear national base in a very crowded field…..