{"id":40802242047,"date":"2019-06-24T09:11:15","date_gmt":"2019-06-24T13:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/?p=40802242047"},"modified":"2021-01-25T11:22:03","modified_gmt":"2021-01-25T16:22:03","slug":"its-all-about-name-recognition-folks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/2019\/06\/24\/its-all-about-name-recognition-folks\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s All About Name Recognition, Folks!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hypothetical general election match-ups don\u2019t mean all that much… yet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Patrick Murray <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was watching a news channel the other day when the resident pundit\nopined that polls show Joe Biden to be the most formidable Democrat against\nDonald Trump. \u201cNo! They do not. Stop saying that,\u201d I shouted into the void.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a great deal of nuance in what these current polls really mean\nversus how they are breathlessly characterized in the 24-hour media environment.\n The main caveat for all 2020 polling is that\nthe campaign really hasn\u2019t started as far as the vast majority of voters are\nconcerned.  They simply are not paying\nenough attention right now to offer carefully considered opinions.  We pretty much say this every time we release\na poll, but journalists and pundits who eat, sleep and breathe the election find\nit difficult to put themselves in the shoes of a typical voter for whom this is\nstill just background noise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though interest in the upcoming election is astronomically\nhigh<\/a>, it\u2019s not clear that voters are keeping up with the details yet.  A recent Quinnipiac Poll<\/a> found that 42% of voters nationwide are currently\npaying a lot of attention to the 2020 campaign, which includes 48% of\nRepublicans, 45% of Democrats, and 36% of independents.  In other words, the majority of voters are really\nnot tuned in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be sure, voters will talk about politics when you ask them \u2013 in a\npoll or in the ubiquitous Iowa diner \u2013 but their opinions at the stage of the\nrace tend to be rather inchoate.  In\nfact, one candidate probably owes his spot on the debate stage this week due\nmainly to the way his name was introduced in a poll of Democratic voters<\/a>\nwho had previously known nothing about him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A recent Monmouth University Poll<\/a> in Nevada bears this out as well.  Likely caucusgoers make up less than one-tenth\nof all registered voters in the state, so it\u2019s fair to assume they would be\namong the most highly engaged.  Of 24\nDemocratic candidates in the field, only three (Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth\nWarren) had nearly universal name recognition and only ten candidates were\nsufficiently well known to get a majority of these highly engaged voters to provide\nan opinion of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, political \u201cmoderates\u201d in this pool of likely Democratic caucusgoers\nwere even less likely to have opinions of the top ten candidates \u2013 to the tune\nof about 7 points less likely on average. \nIt\u2019s no surprise that moderate voters are currently much more likely than\nliberals to throw their support to Biden. \nIt\u2019s not just about ideology.  He\u2019s\nthe one candidate they actually know something about, whereas liberal voters tend\nto be more familiar with many of the other candidates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You have to be especially careful when looking at polls of potential\ngeneral election match-ups.  The graph\nbelow shows Trump\u2019s support in head-to-head contests against four possible\nDemocratic nominees according to nine recent polls.  Across each of these polls, Trump\u2019s numbers\nbarely budge in any of these contests because voters are confident in their\nknowledge of him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Now, take a look at the same graph, but this time showing the four\nDemocrats\u2019 support against Trump.  The\ngraph is ordered based on name recognition, starting on the left with Biden, then\nSanders and Warren, with Pete Buttigieg at the end.  There is almost a straight diagonal line in\nvoter support from the best-known candidate to the least-known in each poll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Name recognition plays a significant role in whether voters are ready\nto say they will support a specific Democrat against Trump, but it does not\nimpact how many voters say they will back the incumbent in any of these four\nscenarios.  These graphs also illustrate\nwhy you\u2019re probably better off just using a simple \u201cTrump reelection support\u201d question\nat this stage of the race rather than any hypothetical head-to-head polls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voter engagement and candidate familiarity matters and will certainly\nchange. This is important to keep in mind not only for lower-tier candidates\nwho could eventually emerge as top contenders, but also for support of the\nsupposed front-runner as well.  Even\nthough Biden already has universal name recognition, it does not mean that\nopinions of him are set in stone.  The\ncampaign will matter. The \u201cJoe Biden\u201d whom voters know today \u2013 or think they\nknow today \u2013 will not be the same candidate they are evaluating in the throes\nof a competitive nomination battle five or six months from now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bottom line is that most Democratic voters will not really tune\ninto this race until the fall. This week\u2019s debates will be a step toward\nintroducing them to a field of candidates they barely know.  Of course, it goes without saying that pundits\nwill seek to immediately declare whose campaign is sunk and who is inexorably\non the rise because of their debate performances. But as far as most voters are\nconcerned, this will be a first look \u2013 and for many just a fleeting glance \u2013 at\na race that still has many laps to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hypothetical general election match-ups don\u2019t mean all that much… yet By Patrick Murray I was watching a news channel the other day when the resident pundit opined that polls show Joe Biden to be the most formidable Democrat against Donald Trump. \u201cNo! They do not. Stop saying that,\u201d I shouted into the void. There is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40802242047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802242047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40802242047"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802242047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40802242133,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802242047\/revisions\/40802242133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40802242047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40802242047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40802242047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}