As the 2020 presidential election draws closer, a lot of people are struggling to make up their minds—about what is in other people’s minds. The last election was a disorienting experience that made Americans second-guess the way they thought things worked in politics, and the intervening years have been disorienting too. It makes sense that some people are wondering how to make the system work in their favor again. The problem is that people aren’t very good at knowing what other people think, and that sometimes, asking this simple question can lead them astray.
One way this has been playing out in the Democratic primary is the question of “electability.” People want somebody who can beat Trump, understandably. But the effect that’s had in polls is harder to parse. In polls, many Democrats express support for Elizabeth Warren, who draws thousands to her rallies, but she’s dogged in those same polls by the perception that other voters won’t like her. Joe Biden, meanwhile, gets a tepid reception most everywhere he goes, yet he remains the front-runner partly because people believe he’s a candidate others would prefer.
Is that true, though? Part of the reason people think so is due to the head-to-head polls that often show Biden doing well against Trump, with Warren a little behind. Another explanation for Biden’s stronger showing is that he has high name recognition and a soft glow left over from his VP days. But that’s misleading, too, because it’s unclear how Biden will look to voters in November after nearly another year of scrutiny. Case in point: In 2015, Hillary Clinton was fairly popular and Trump very unpopular, and look how that worked out.
