The Democratic horse race

I’m firmly of the opinion that horse race coverage is counter-productive. Nevertheless, in analyzing the Democratic pre-primary process, I find that I need to refer to horse race polling in order to discuss some of the problems unfolding. In a certain sense, I’m writing this as an advanced appendix for a forthcoming piece on media bias.

Weighted average of polling by date, candidates with highest cumulative polling averages over time, updated 10/29/2019.

The first thing to keep in mind is that horse race polling is extremely volatile…