Thread by @RachelBitecofer

Got a Pre-Super Tuesday Data 💣 For You!!

This is exclusive content from our @WasonCenter VA Primary poll, my last VA poll ever.

I decided to celebrate it by using the poll to look at two things largely left unexamined by other polls: name ID & voter impressions of candidates

Long-time followers know I rant about how tuned out the American electorate is & that we all live in a bubble. IMHO this can sometimes lead to conclusions that are spurious gen.medium.com/electability-p…

I'm sure you, dear followers, can name all 200 candidates that ran for the Dem nomination- but have you ever wondered how normal voters fare? Asked to recall as many candidates as possible, the month before Super Tues, 91% of voters could name 7 or less. 6% couldn't name any.

And thanks to @tedatkinson's help with coding last night, I'm able to show you how well each candidate penetrated the electorate in terms of name ID. Outside the top tier, few candidates are well recognized. Even Biden & Sanders failed to be mentioned by more than 1/4 of voters.

BTW: thanks to @tedatkins diligent job on the coding, I'll be able to dig into this mention data to determine who is and who is not good at candidate recall. Y'all should give him a follow as a thanks for his help.

I also asked voters for the 1st word that pops into their head for each of the candidates so we could get a sense of what voters know about these candidates.

Here is Biden

Sanders

Bloomberg

Buttigieg

Klobuchar

Warren

And here is Trump

Finally, I asked voters what the ONE quality a candidate for president should have that is most important. Here is what they say.

The candidate recall & impressions data is drawn from our 2020 VA Dem Primary poll. These questions were asked of all voters in our survey. You can see the survey methods & the rest of that great survey here cnu.edu/wasoncenter/su…

And so concludes my 4 years as a horse race pollster. Proud to say that I am a damn good one- thx to @QuentinKidd for giving me free license to design the surveys, analyze them, & introduce innovative likely voter modeling techniques & for believing in the estimates they produced