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We also know where candidates do best in the US which lets us look forward to the primaries.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren does well among Caucasian respondents. Biden does best among Black respondents, and Sanders and Yang do best among Asian Democrats.
Since late 2018, Insider has been conducting a recurring national survey through SurveyMonkey Audience to determine the state of the Democratic field. While the main thing pollsters are interested in is who's winning at any given time, or the percentage of voters who would vote today for a given candidate, Insider approached the 2020 Democrats from another angle.
Given that so much of this election is a large number of candidates competing for different - and often overlapping - constituencies or lanes within the party, we've asked whether a given respondent has heard of the candidate and then whether that person would be satisfied or unsatisfied in the event a given contender became the nominee.
This lets us figure out who's competing with whom, which candidates are targeting different wings of the party altogether, and who voters are specifically deciding between.
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In just over six weeks, Iowans will hold the first caucus of the Democratic primary. Given how close we are to the actual contests, Insider analyzed the various accumulated supporters amassed by each of the candidates running for president. Mainly, we hope to find out what kind of voters they perform well among and what kind they don't.
Here's where the race stands, just weeks to go before votes are cast.
Men and women view the race differently: Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren do better among women, while Andrew Yang, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Sen. Bernie Sanders do better among men.
The Democratic primary will be decided by women, who make up a majority of the party. Based on our polling, 57% of the people who said they'd participate in their state's Democratic primary said were women, and the path to nomination must entail doing well among women.
Some candidates are pretty underwater with women. We've only got a few polls for him, but former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg does nearly 8 percentage points better among men than he does among women, and technology businessman Andrew Yang is also staring down a similar disadvantage.
On the other hand, Sen. Amy Klobuchar does much better among women than men, performing 8 percentage points better among women.
Age is one of the most polarizing factors in the race. Just a few candidates — Sen. Elizabeth Warren foremost among them — do about as well as usual among all age brackets in the set.
Age is one of the most remarkable splits in this primary.
In one corner, there are candidates that excel among younger people: Sen. Bernie Sanders is satisfactory as nominee for 70% of voters aged 18 to 29, which is over 15 percentage points better than his performance overall. On the other hand, he's at 39% among those 60 and up, which is 16 percentage points less than usual. Andrew Yang has a considerable younger skew as well.
In the other corner, you've got candidates that do poorly among young people but very well among older Democratic primary voters. Former Vice President Joe Biden's numbers are functionally the inverse of Sanders' — underperforming among young people by 16 percentage points and over-performing among those 60 and up by 15 points.
He's not alone: Mayor Pete Buttigieg has a remarkable older skew, despite being the youngest contender in the field, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Sen. Cory Booker haven't resonated with young people.
Among the frontrunners, Sen. Elizabeth Warren does basically as well among young people as older people, among Gen X and Gen Z. Make no mistake, that's an advantage: respondents 18 to 29 were about a quarter of our Democratic respondents, and those 60 and up were about a fifth, so it's going to take a broader coalition to pull off a win.
In 2016, exit polls showed that 45 percent of Clinton voters were not white, and the winner of the Democratic primary will have to build a coalition of White, Black, Latino and Asian Americans.
Much of the conversation about the race has meandered around this chart: African Americans were about a fifth of Clinton's voters, but just two candidates — Joe Biden and Sen. Cory Booker — do better among Black respondents than the typical Democratic primary voter.
Some candidates, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren in particular, significantly underperform among respondents of color, not just Black Americans but Asian and Latino respondents as well.
There are other compelling features in this chart, such as Sanders' and Yang's performance among Latinos, who do skew younger than the general population. Indeed, Sanders does worst among Caucasian respondents, a fascinating statistic given that he's the senator from Vermont, where 94% of people are white.
This chart is linked heavily to the next one, which is how they do region by region.
The four regions that allocate the bulk of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention are the South Atlantic (16%), Pacific (16%), Mid-Atlantic (16%) and Eastern Midwest (15%).
Most of the delegates that go to the DNC are from the coasts and the Great Lakes region, but the early states are in the Western Midwest, New England, the South Atlantic, and Mountain regions.
Everyone's got their base of support. Biden does best in the Mid-Atlantic and South, where African Americans make up a large percentage of the primary electorate. Warren's a coastal candidate, doing well in her New England home base but also the West Coast. Sanders does best out West, in the Mountain and Pacific time zones.
Mayor Pete is really interesting: he does merely okay in the eastern Midwest, where South Bend is. But he does really well in New England, where he went to college in Boston. Well, not in Boston, but nearby. (No, not Tufts.)
Other candidates have their bases of support: Sen. Amy Klobuchar is a force to be reckoned with in the Western Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic is Bloomberg country and Yang is a West Coast candidate.
Candidates come from different wings of the party, and that's also going to be a major factor in this election.
We ask respondents what best describes their political views, asking them to choose between "Very liberal," "Moderately liberal," "Slightly liberal," "Neither liberal nor conservative," "Slightly conservative," "Moderately conservative" and "Very conservative."
Naturally, most of the people who said they were going to participate in the Democratic primary identified as some degree of liberal: 22% said very, 34% said moderately, and 14% said slightly liberal. Another 15% said they weren't liberal or conservative.
Some candidates like Biden, Yang, and Bloomberg appeal more the the slightly liberal contingent in the party. Others like Warren, Sanders, and Castroare most appealing to the very liberal wing. In the middle are candidates like Booker, Klobuchar, and Buttigieg, who thrive among the part of the party that self-described as moderately liberal.
(Altogether, 11% of respondents who said they'd participate in the Democratic primary identified as some degree of conservative, which is fairly normal — Trump is a unique opponent to say the least, and there are lots of reasons why a generally liberal or conservative worldview does not define an individuals vote — but those were left off this chart for sample size purposes. Worth highlighting is that Rep. Tulsi Gabbarddoes remarkably well among this group of people.)
This chart is instructive, because it's simply not possible to assemble a winning coalition of Democrats without being a little appealing to people across the party.
