POWER RANKING: Here's who has the best chance of becoming the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, Business Insider - Business Insider Singapore

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With 11 major candidates in the race, the Democratic 2020 presidential field is set to be one of the largest, most competitive, and most unpredictable in modern history.

To help make sense of where all these candidates stand, Insider has been conducting a recurring SurveyMonkey Audience national poll. You can download every poll here, down to the individual respondent data.

Read more about how the Insider 2020 Democratic primary tracker works.

We’re mainly interested in using our polling to figure out:

We’ve combined Insider’s polling and results of Morning Consult’s daily survey of the 2020 Democratic primary to create a power ranking of declared and potential 2020 candidates.

With less than three weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses, the race is heating up, and every day presents a crucial make-or-break opportunity for the candidates. Recently, we said goodbye to former Rep. John Delaney, Sen. Cory Booker and Marianne Williamson, who dropped out of the race.

Last week, we downgraded Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard but upgraded Andrew Yang.

Here’s what our ranking looks like as of January 31, 2020.


11: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

Gabbard has some serious viability problems among Democrats.

Not only do a significant proportion of respondents in Insider polling say they are unhappy with her as the nominee compared with her rivals, but Gabbard has not been able to consolidate support in a meaningful way.

Despite being one of the first to enter the race, Gabbard is still polling at 1% in Morning Consult and is considered a less viable opponent to President Donald Trump in the general election than most other candidates.

While Gabbard’s performance earned her lots of praise from right-wing media and even the Trump campaign, its exceedingly difficult to see how it helps her win over Democratic primary voters.

Gabbard’s decision to spend her precious resources and money on a lawsuit against Hillary Clinton seeking $50 million that she is likely to lose instead of focusing on courting voters indicates she is not running a completely sincere campaign for president, landing her in the bottom of our ranking.

Read more about Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign.


10: Former Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts

Massachusetts Governor Patrick smiles in the Red Sox dugout before MLB American League baseball action in BostonReuters

Like Michael Bloomberg, Patrick also made an extremely late entry into the race, officially announcing his campaign on November 14.

While Patrick hasn’t been very active on the political scene for the past few years, he’s led a long career in business and politics. He served as the governor of Massachusetts from 2007 to 2015, and was most recently a managing director at Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Sen. Mitt Romney.

Patrick will have a tough uphill battle in his presidential bid, and it’s almost impossible to see a clear path to him winning any primary contests at all, much less a path to the nomination, which is why we put him in 13th place near the bottom of our ranking.

He’s missed the filing deadline for two key Super Tuesday state primaries in Alabama and Arkansas, and unlike Bloomberg, he doesn’t have billions of dollars in personal wealth to draw from.

More importantly, Patrick doesn’t seem to have a clear rationale for running for president other than trying to position himself as a unifying Obama-type figure – the exact lane Biden is occupying, situating him in second-to-last place in our ranking.