Andrew Yang Overtakes Pete Buttigieg to Become Fourth Most Favored Primary Candidate: Poll
Andrew Yang has slightly overtaken Pete Buttigieg in the 2020 Democratic primary net favorability rankings following the sixth debate between party candidates, a new poll has found.
The entrepreneur’s net favorability score—the share of potential Democratic primary voters who view him positively minus those with unfavorable views—jumped seven points after the Los Angeles debate, according to Morning Consult.
As a result of the post-debate boost, Yang now has a net favorability score of 34 percent, putting him in fourth place and a point ahead of Pete Buttigieg on 33 percent.
(Featured image is “P5180007” by Juankbrera. Used under a creative commons license.)
As we were discussing on Twitter, the fact that we are making headlines out of fourth place – that’s fourth place with a 4 in it – shows the static nature of this race and the weakness of the field. Much as in motorsports, when the announcers/commentators are talking about the “battle for third/fourth place” it means the leader is well out and front and not being challenged, otherwise that better, more important story would be the one being discussed.Report
Yangmentum, dude.Report
I wish there was more yangmentum. I think Yang should have started a bit earlier (maybe 6 months to a year).Then he’d be polling well into the double digits now. As it is, he has to overcome a lot of inertia and he hasn’t got much time.Report
I am feeling neither Yangst nor Yanger. By being part of the debate, he is helping shape it. Libertarians helped with not only Medicinal Marijuana’s debate, but the Recreational Marijuana debate. I saw Libertarian arguments used in the service of SSM.
In the same way, the debate is nudged in certain (good!) directions by My Main Man here.
He is the Yangel on top of the Christmas tree in my heart.Report
In getting marijuana measures passed, the Libertarians opened the door for black market marijuana vaping cartridges that caused deaths and permanent lung injury, resulting in a health panic and Trump raising the legal smoking and vaping age to 21.
Thanks for striking a blow for freedom, fellas! O_OReport
Studies are inconclusive.
Anyway, you should be smoking the sticky green itself (or eating it). It’s like complaining that the bathtub gin is low quality. Drink wine! That’s what wine is for, you numbskulls!Report
Yes, but they accomplished what even the smoking Nazis could not, raising the smoking age to 21.
It’s pretty obvious that if a 20 year old isn’t competent to own a pistol, drink beer, or smoke, they certainly shouldn’t be allowed to vote because their judgment is obviously flawed and fundamentally unsound.
To really shakes things up though, we shouldn’t allow them to take out loans because they’re too immature to understand the ramifications. Colleges will just love that!Report
He’s doing better than Amy so I’m happy for ya Jay; I still don’t think he’s gonna get many to any delegates.Report
If he changes the debate, it’s a shame that he doesn’t get many delegates.
If he gets the frontrunner to adopt one of his non-UBI positions? It doesn’t matter if he gets a single one.Report
Which non-UBI position of his do you like the most?Report
Abolishing the Daylight Saving Time change.
Sure, he wants the government to take our hour and keep it forever, but we’d never have to switch ever again.
It’d be worth it to let Obama keep our hour forever.Report
Disagree partially. The race is rather static, I agree with that, but I think it’s because of the strength of the candidates; not weakness. We’ve seen what a race looks like with a grab bag of weak candidates- it’s a rolling ball of dysfunction with one candidate after the other rising to the top and then sinking back down. See the GOP field in 2015. The given candidates in this field aren’t staying mostly where they’re at due to weakness but due to strength. Which is why we don’t have a different leader of the month every month.Report
Nate Silver breaks it down:
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I ain’t never felt foolish giving weight to the judgement of Nate Silver.Report
Agree in general. There is one other reason the race seems static. Nothing has happened since we aren’t at the primaries yet. All these months have not had actual events. It’s a lot of talk and PR and news fluffing and debates for whatever little they are worth, but nothing that shows where people are actually at. Certainly not where the non politics nerds are at. It just feels like the race has been going on forever so we should have some idea where things are at. But we are just warming up for the first inning to drop the puck for the kickoff.Report
An extremely important point and an especially salutary one to raise in our rarefied online community of political nerds. Well done.Report
One of the problems I have with Yang’s candidacy is that he’s a “new idea” techie guy. Such folks don’t necessarily make very good leaders because most new policy ideas fail because of real world complexities. There’s very often some good reasons why we’re not already using policy X, Y, or Z, reasons that may not be immediately obvious. Now certainly the other tendency, old folks who are hidebound by tradition, can be an equal or worse problem, but with them, new policies that are adopted usually have broad support and data to back them up.
Tech guys, engineering types, and out-of-the-box thinkers are great for think tanks and conferences, and as their ideas get batted back and forth, the good ones get filtered from the bad ones (in theory) and as the idea catches more attention, some politicians will adopt it as a goal and see if they can manage to pass and implement it. The latter is the sausage making part of legislation, and often tech billionaires don’t have the patience, nuance, or understanding of that aspect of government. They make great TED Talks, but might not be at all good at running a government, and indeed might turn out to be a disaster because they always have to be trying something quirky.
That problem is different from a bureaucrat or legislator who simply mandates a solution, often to a problem they created earlier, despite contradictory requirements making it impossible to follow the mandate. Here’s an example, a new California law going into effect for 2020.
That sounds great, except it means they have to provide electricity to any customer (medical conditions are randomly distributed) even though power is cut off to all the customers. I suggest magic electrons. Unless PG&E gives away free generators, along with the highly expensive transfer switching gear, there is no way for them to fulfill this requirement.
Yang would probably suggest some wildly expensive way to provide electricity to any random customer (microwave beams, PG&E funded battery/inverter systems) instead of solving the real problem, that California laws, regulations, and mandates made it impossible for PG&E to run a safe grid, something other states don’t have a problem with.Report
It is a pity that a perfectly reasonable and thought provoking comment about how technocrats are not political leaders is ruined by a completely unnecessary, completely wrong, aside
…. that California laws, regulations, and mandates made it impossible for PG&E to run a safe grid, something other states don’t have a problem with.
There’s nothing in California’s regulations that makes it impossible to have a safe grid. Like everyone else, from Albania to Zambia, from Alabama to Wyoming, California mandates, essentially, that vegetation be kept away from power lines, and that power lines withstand wind forces that can reasonably be expected to occur. California, like everyone else, allocates a certain percentage of the distribution tariff to cover the related expenses to achieve all of the above.
For some reason, most likely corporate greed, PG&E, who operates on a part of the country where strong, sustained, winds are common, and where wet and dry weather alternate, creating year.y piles of tinder dry dead vegetation, neither keeps the required clearance nor builds lines strong enough.
If anything, California’s failure hasn’t been to allow PG&E to ignore the regulations for many years, to the point where the state is crisscrossed by weak power lines running through masses of dry vegetation, lines that will fall to the ground with the next strong wind, or the one after that, and create blazing walls of flames that the same winds will push forward for miles.
There’s nothing special about California regulations. There’s local California weather, and it is up to PG&E to build and maintain their power lines in line with the local weather conditions, with the money California mandates customers to pay for specifically that.
Notice the one thing PG&E doesn’t say in their defense. They never argued that the money the tariff allocates is too little to pay for vegetation clearance and stronger lines. PG&E has never argued that California mandates them to do unreasonable things or things that the tariff does not cover. If PG&E had been earnestly trying to do all that California requires, and couldn’t because the tariff did not pay enough, PG&E would have been every day lobbying for ta4iff increases to cover for more vegetation clearing. But they don’t lobby for more money, because they are not even trying to do the required vegetation clearance.
Yes, technocrats can’t mandate engineering solutions to political problems. But they should be allowed to mandate engineering solutions to technical problems. Running utilities is a technical problem. One that involves externalities. Bush fires from tumbling power lines is one such externality. Pollution is another. There are technical solutions to minimize the impact of those externalities. Let technocrats do their thing.Report
How can you not love this guy?
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When he spouts off ridiculous statistics about disappearing industries that aren’t accurate, and he is smart enough to check and doesn’t, which makes it fearmongering, but he is still more likable than most of that weak field, so…you know what that makes my head heart and my heart sad so just going to stop right there.Report