Electability Findings from YouGov Survey, with Further Context

New Yahoo News/YouGov poll: Who is strongest against Trump? Must-win states and swing voters show Biden holds edge over Sanders

Andrew Romano | February 28, 2020

A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll suggests that Sanders could be a riskier nominee than his supporters are willing to admit. In a national trial heat with Trump, Sanders led 48 percent to 42 percent among registered voters. Yet when the playing field was narrowed to the 10 states that were closest in the 2016 presidential election and that will likely decide 2020 — Michigan, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Minnesota, Nevada, Maine, North Carolina and Arizona — Sanders’s lead over Trump was slashed in half (48 percent to 45 percent). That 3-point gap was within the margin of error.

In contrast, former Vice President Joe Biden led Trump by 9 points nationally (50 percent to 41 percent) and by 7 points (50 percent to 43 percent) in the battleground states.

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The poll suggests that Sanders’s liberalism could hinder him in the states that will matter most in November. For instance, self-identified Democrats favor Medicare for All, 53 percent to 23 percent — but voters in battleground states oppose the policy, 31 percent to 53 percent. Similarly, battleground-state voters oppose free public-college tuition (37 percent to 50 percent) and decriminalizing illegal border crossings (28 percent to 57 percent). These are all policies that Sanders favors and Biden opposes.

Sanders supporters argue that he would win in November by turning out historic numbers of young voters, new voters and voters of color. But as a New York Times analysis recently noted, Sanders has prevailed so far in the Democratic primary by “expanding his appeal among traditional Democratic voters, not by driving record turnout.” Meanwhile, a new study by political scientists from Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, showed that nominating Sanders would drive many Americans who would otherwise vote for a moderate Democrat to vote for Trump — losses that Sanders could only offset by inspiring an unprecedented 11-percentage-point turnout boost among young left-leaning voters, who haven’t showed up at anything approaching that level this year.