Candidates to watch out for, post-debate

Source: Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted November 20-22

The fifth Democratic debate has come and gone, and the primary field is still as crowded as ever. Among the many candidates jockeying for the Democratic nomination, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren maintain their leads according to the polls.

Yet a number of the second-tier candidates had a strong showing at the debate, which may potentially have influenced voters’ perceptions of them.

Ipsos tracked Twitter mentions and sentiments about the candidates during the fifth debate night, yielding some interesting results. For instance, as the volume of chatter about Andrew Yang took off, Twitter sentiment about him gradually trended towards positive over the course of the debate. Amy Klobuchar had the most consistently positive reception of any candidate. Pete Buttigieg also ended the night on an upswing in Twitter sentiment.

Similarly, a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos post-debate poll found that those three candidates netted the most favorability among KnowledgePanel respondents. Notably, this same post-debate poll found that Biden dropped in favorability.

Our ongoing Reuters/Ipsos candidate tracker reflects similar findings. We see that the candidates who performed well in post-debate favorability and our Twitter tracker – namely Klobuchar, Yang, and Buttigieg – have edged up, while the three current front runners failed to gain much ground. In fact, Biden and Sanders dropped 4 and 1 percentage points respectively, according to Reuters/Ipsos data. Though he has slipped slightly, Biden still has a comfortable lead on all the other candidates, polling at 26% among Democrats.

Of course, many factors beyond debate performance influence voters’ perceptions of candidates. Nor are all voters active on or paying attention to Twitter.

A lot can happen between now and the nomination, but the candidate to watch for may well be Pete Buttigieg, currently the closest to potentially closing in on the top three frontrunners. His rise has not been meteoric per se (think the tortoise, not the hare), but polls in Iowa and New Hampshire suggest that his platform and message are increasingly resonating with voters.