Joe Biden vs Bernie Sanders: what the heck is going on with the Missouri democratic primary?
This upcoming Tuesday, several states will cast their votes in the Democratic 2020 primary race. Joe Biden has surged into the lead in Michigan, and has surged into a statistical tie in Washington State. Biden is also expected to win Mississippi in a major blowout. But then we get to Missouri, and things are looking… odd.
Two new polls have been released in Missouri. One, from Emerson, has Joe Biden up by four points over Bernie Sanders. The other poll, from Missouri Scout, has Biden up by twenty-two points over Sanders. When there’s this much of a variation between polls, there’s usually some specific identifiable reason. But these two polls have both eliminated all the candidates who recently dropped out. They were conducted and released in the exact same timeframe. And at least one of them is very wrong.
This isn’t necessarily surprising, though. It’s been my observation that for whatever reason, the less media coverage a state primary race gets, the less accurate the polls in that state end up being. There’s also the reality that four major candidates have dropped out of the race in the past six days, and pollsters now have the tricky job of finding a representative sample even as people are rapidly changing their minds.
Interestingly, Joe Biden is holding a major rally today in Kansas City, Missouri. So he’s clearly looking to win the state, or perhaps run up the score. Campaigns tend to have internal polling that’s far more detailed and accurate than public-facing polls. We’ll see what happens in the state on Tuesday.
