- Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina was the last such televised debate before not only the South Carolina primary on Saturday but also Super Tuesday.
- Several themes were conspicuous: Bernie Sanders, the delegate leader at this point, taking critiques from all other candidates.
- Mike Bloomberg, who has blanketed Super Tuesday states in advertisements promoting his bid, continued to take heat from Elizabeth Warren over his business record.
- Finally, appeals were made to African American voters, who compose a major electoral force in not only South Carolina but Super Tuesday states as a whole.
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Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate saw all semblance of comity or composure collapse in the Democratic field. Where once candidates made elaborate pains to finish before time had expired, or to avoid interrupting a rival, or to boost an adversary’s plan and elevate someone as a worthy Democrat, this debate was sloppy.
Even the previous debates saw most candidates unite with a common purpose, such as dunking on former Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York City. No such espirit de corps was on display Tuesday night. And the reason is simple: With one exception, everyone is losing, and unless they can win big on Saturday in South Carolina and win massive on Tuesday in over a dozen states composing 35% of all delegates, they won’t become their party’s 2020 presidential nominee.
For the past several months, Insider has been conducting a recurring SurveyMonkey Audience poll to track the state of the 2020 Democratic primary field. You can download every poll here, down to the individual respondent data. (Read more about how the Insider Democratic primary tracker works here).
There were numerous themes at work Tuesday, and it’s worth checking the polling to get a sense of their true origin.
Everyone tried to reach black voters
Many candidates made repeated overtures to black Democrats; particularly, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and former Vice President Joe Biden pointed to their records and their aspirations to help voters of color. Biden is the only candidate polling above water with black voters besides Tom Steyer, and that’s the only component of the former vice president’s polling that doesn’t look terrible.
Buttigieg, on the other hand, could barely be doing worse among black voters. Fully 49% of Democratic primary voters polled by Insider who have heard of him say he would be satisfied in the event he became the nominee. Concentrating on black Democratic primary voters, that falls a breathtaking 24 percentage points.
That is the single largest gulf in support in the field between a candidate's overall polling and his or her polling among a specific demographic. There's nothing quite like it in the set, unless you observe the 21-point gap that Buttigieg also sees in Latino voters.
Bloomberg is strong in the places that vote in Super Tuesday
A second component of this debate was the candidates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts in particular, attacking Bloomberg's treatment of women in the course of operating his business. The gender numbers are about what one would expect, with Bloomberg severely underwater among respondents who identified as female. But the strategy may have more to it, as Bloomberg has gone all in on a Super Tuesday strategy.
Though he appears to do best in mid-Atlantic states that will not vote until late April, Bloomberg does very well in the South Atlantic states (Virginia and North Carolina vote Tuesday) and better than typical in the western South (Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas also vote on Super Tuesday) and in mountain states (Colorado, Utah).
Tuesday night's debate may have been the last chance for rivals to undermine the billionaire before the largest date on the calendar, and interestingly enough it was only Warren who seemed up to the task.
Candidates had to hit Bernie
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is not as weak as he looks among the moderates of the party, and a major effort of the contenders onstage Tuesday night was to try to sandbag the senator among those on the fence.
Sanders is clearly beloved by the left, with 77% of Democratic voters who identified as very liberal in Insider polling being satisfied with him as nominee for the presidency. But Sanders does really well among the rest of the party, too. Fifty-nine percent of those who identified as moderately liberal - a statistic higher than that of not only Biden and Buttigieg but anyone who is not Warren - say they'd be satisfied with a Sanders nomination. And among the slightly liberal, 51% seem fine with Sanders as nominee, which may be lower than Biden but is still higher than everyone else in the entire field, even Buttigieg.
Sanders has appeal far beyond his base, and it took three primary wins for the rest of the field to pick up on that. That's why the debate went the way it did.
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SurveyMonkey Audience polls from a national sample balanced by census data of age and gender. Respondents are incentivized to complete surveys through charitable contributions. Generally speaking, digital polling tends to skew toward people with access to the internet. SurveyMonkey Audience doesn't try to weigh its sample based on race or income.
