Bernie Sanders’ SMI has improved to the greatest extent of the declared candidates from October to January, which puts him in an admirable position going into tonight’s debate as well as into primary season. The increase has also pushed Sanders into the SMI leadership position among the declared candidates.
Much of his improvement appears to be due to the endorsement by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”) in mid-October. Since that time, their SMIs appear increasingly linked with both showing improvement. However, as AOC’s SMI was considerably higher at the time of endorsement, Sanders has disproportionately benefited, providing a major advantage to Sanders in the fight for the nomination.
Surprisingly, Hillary Clinton’s SMI has also improved significantly. Though already high, once rumors began of her potential entrance into the race, her SMI showed one of the largest positive trends.
Outside of these influencers, SMIs of the Democratic field have not seen any major sustained breakouts since October. Considering how late we are in the race, such data does not bode well for the other candidates.
This post and these concepts continue our interpretation of the 2020 Democratic nomination along the same lines — namely, that:
Sanders the New Front-Runner?
The improvement experienced by Sanders has pushed him into SMI leadership.
We have seen this previously, however, in the Democratic nomination. As stated, this race has been characterized by brief spikes of social media influence for a variety of candidates. Such SMI improvements proved unsustainable as declines followed. Such a pattern is fairly unusual this far into a campaign. Normally, by this stage, one or two candidates have pulled significantly ahead, have impressive SMIs, and those SMIs have remained at high levels. As described in previous reports, this is not the case for the 2020 Democrats.
Given the pattern of spikes among the Democratic field, we would like to see him sustain such leadership before making further forecasts. A particularly important benchmark will be tonight’s debate. It will be of interest to see if his SMI lead continues into next week.
Our base case is that Sanders has SMI leadership and the strongest momentum going into February, when voting begins. This provides him an enormous advantage. It should also help him in tonight’s debate.
On the negative side, we view his status as front-runner as inherently unstable. According to our SMI analysis, his SMI has become increasingly linked with that of AOC. At first glance, this appears extremely positive — and in fact he has benefited tremendously. But the question of how strong is Sanders the candidate versus his derived benefit of being supported by AOC emerges. We will cover this topic in future posts. For now, we should highlight simply that a derived strength will not be as consistent as an internal strength — and it looks like right now much of Sanders’ strength is derived.