How to explain 2020 Democrats' churning polls

The party's political junkies are nervous

A donkey.
(Image credit: Illustrated | dejanj01/iStock, Tetiana Garkusha/iStock, iarti/iStock)

Is the Democratic race for president a farcical clown car of candidates? Or do Democrats simply have a remarkable bounty of capable alternatives from which to choose, and plenty of time to sift through them? The answer is "both." There is both stability and ferment, confidence and anxiety, depending on where you look. Much of the drama of the campaign so far may in fact reflect the manic indecision of certain voters more than it does anything real on the ground. And its the voters who are most plugged in who may be the most anxious and indecisive.

At the top of the polls, the race for the Democratic nomination has been quite stable over a long period of time. The leading candidates are Vice President Joe Biden — who is expected to officially announce he's running on Thursday — and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight has collected 68 national polls so far, and Biden and Sanders have taken the top two slots in all but three of those where both candidates are mentioned. The story is similar in polls of Iowa and New Hampshire.

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Noah Millman

Noah Millman is a screenwriter and filmmaker, a political columnist and a critic. From 2012 through 2017 he was a senior editor and featured blogger at The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Politico, USA Today, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Modern Age, First Things, and the Jewish Review of Books, among other publications. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.