Which 2020 Candidate Got The Biggest Polling Bump Out Of Their Kickoff?

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When candidates run for president, they want to make a good first impression. Campaigns can spend weeks planning a candidate’s kickoff — the announcement, the flashy video, the bunting-adorned events — and strategizing ways to build on that early attention. And so far, some candidates have had more successful kickoffs than others.

We can see how 2020 contenders are faring on this front thanks to Morning Consult’s weekly national poll of likely voters in the Democratic presidential primary.1 Here’s a look at how the support for various candidates changed over time relative to the week of their announcement.2 Of course, not every candidate about whom Morning Consult asked is included in this chart — we’ve excluded potential candidates who haven’t yet officially announced their runs (including top overall vote-getter Joe Biden), as well as people who declared too early or too recently for us to have polling data both before and after their announcements. As you can see, candidates typically get at least a small bump in the poll from the week before their declaration to the week after. Out of the six candidates for whom we have both before and after data,3 Sen. Kamala Harris appears to have had the best campaign launch so far.



Harris gained 8 percentage points between the poll the week before her Jan. 21 announcement and the poll the week after. And horse-race polling wasn’t the only indicator that Harris had an effective kickoff. Harris’s announcement also succeeded at getting more voters to see her in a positive light. According to a different set of polls done by Morning Consult (sponsored by Politico and conducted among registered voters), the share of Democrats with an opinion of Harris (favorable rating plus unfavorable rating) rose from 49 percent before her announcement to 57 percent after it, and her net favorability rating (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) improved from +35 to +41. Finally, there was a bigger spike in Google searches of Harris’s name after her announcement than there were after any of the other candidates’ announcements — although Google searches are hardly a tried-and-true political metric.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who lost the 2016 Democratic primary to Hillary Clinton, had nearly as big of a bump as Harris. Sanders gained 6 points between the Feb. 11-17 poll and last week’s poll (he announced on Feb. 19). That’s especially impressive considering that he was already a well-known commodity. And he has already had the best kickoff going by another metric: fundraising (although it might not be as predictive as early polling). He raised $5.9 million in just 24 hours after his announcement; the next-highest total in the field was Harris’s $1.5 million.

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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-2020-candidate-got-the-biggest-polling-bump-out-of-their-kickoff/