July 31, 2019

Warren Wins Democratic Activist Group’s Debate Straw Poll

52 percent of participants said they were most impressed with Warren’s performance on Tuesday night.

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), participate in the first of two Democratic presidential primary debates hosted by CNN Tuesday, July 30, 2019, in the Fox Theatre in Detroit.Paul Sancya/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The Democratic party’s progressive base watched two of its top-tier candidates, Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), spar with eight other 2020 hopefuls on CNN’s debate stage on Tuesday night. According to a straw poll conducted by Indivisible, the national progressive grassroots organization founded in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory that has served as a pillar of the “resistance” movement against him ever since, Warren impressed that base the most.

The results come from a flash poll Indivisible conducted via text message at the conclusion of Tuesday night’s debate. It asked thousands of its members—more than 1 million volunteers activated after Trump’s 2016 victory who worked to flip House seats during the 2018 midterms—which candidate they’d support based on their debate performance; 52 percent said they were most impressed with Warren. Nearly 5,000 members across all 50 states responded immediately after the debate.

Warren’s standing in Tuesday night’s poll nearly matched the reception she received from Indivisible members during the first Democratic debates in Miami last month. Then, Warren faced off against former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who came in second and third, respectively, in Indivisible’s poll.

Warren’s major moment came when she went head-to-head with former Maryland congressman John Delaney over whether some of the Democratic party’s most ambitious proposals, like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, were unrealistic and pushed the party too far left. “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” Warren said to Delaney, a millionaire businessman who is largely self-funding his campaign for the presidency.

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg came in second in the straw poll with 19 percent of the vote. He earned praise for his analysis that Republicans would label Democrats as “crazy socialists” regardless of the proposals they put forward. “So let’s just stand up for the right policy,” he said.

Sanders came in third, earning only 13 percent of votes from those surveyed.

This straw poll, like all others, is far from scientific. But Indivisible’s members represent a key demographic for the Democratic candidate competing in the 2020 campaign. Its members skew female, and while certainly liberal, they aren’t far-left. Their chief motivation is removing President Trump from office, not conducting progressive purity tests.

María Urbina, Indivisible’s national political director, says that the candidates’ focus on progressive policies—Medicare for All in particular—proved that liberal stances have strong salience among the Democratic electorate. “Senator Warren, Mayor Buttigieg, and Senator Sanders used the stage to push for big ideas and demonstrate why the candidates spouting Republican talking points aren’t being serious about achieving real change,” Urbina says. “Where some expected tonight to be a cage match between Warren and Sanders, it was ultimately a lesson in how progressive ideas about big structural change are the only way to beat Donald Trump.”

The group will conduct another flash poll after Wednesday night’s debate, which will feature another 10 Democratic candidates, including frontrunners Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.) and former vice president Joe Biden. Mother Jones will have those results, as well.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate