There hasn’t been much public polling in the Democratic primary race, and it hasn’t offered too many surprises even on the few occasions when it has materialized. Until Thursday night.
In what might be the most surprising results of the cycle, Fox News released polls in South Carolina and Nevada showing Tom Steyer in a strong position: second place with 15 percent of the vote in the South Carolina primary, and tied for third with 12 percent of the vote in Nevada.
It’s enough to qualify him for next week’s Democratic debate, and it at least raises the question of whether he’s poised to play a more meaningful role in the race.
The results are unexpected enough that you could be forgiven for questioning the validity of the polling. That would be a mistake.
Fox News polls are of high quality, and the sample is large enough that the result can’t be dismissed as noise. The findings are not wholly without corroboration. Morning Consult’s early state tracking shows Mr. Steyer at 10 percent combined across the four early states.
Earlier polls of South Carolina showed signs of Mr. Steyer’s emerging strength, including showings of 7 percent and 8 percent in November polls by YouGov and the University of North Florida.
The explanation for Mr. Steyer’s surge is straightforward: uncontested dominance of the airwaves. According to FiveThirtyEight’s ad spending tracker, he has spent more on television advertisements than all other candidates combined — with the exception of the other billionaire in the race, Michael Bloomberg.
In contrast with Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Steyer’s advertisements are concentrated in the four early states, though his spending in Iowa and New Hampshire has not yielded a similar breakthrough. That’s probably because other candidates are spending there. There may be another reason: Perhaps there’s something to the claim that Iowa and New Hampshire take their responsibilities at the top of the calendar more seriously than other states, looking at more than campaign ads.
The Fox polls suggest that Mr. Steyer has made broad gains among Democratic voters, spanning most age, educational, racial and ideological groups. The breadth of his support is fairly impressive, given that the Democratic electorate has often split along factional lines so far this cycle. The depth of his support is untested, though.
The polls have one immediate, tangible consequence: Mr. Steyer has qualified for the next debate, placing him on the stage with Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. And the results of these polls alone could be enough to set up the kind of media boomlet that has yielded surges in the past.
Put it together, and Mr. Steyer could dream of being in a coveted position: surging with just a few weeks to go until Iowa. There’s plenty of precedent for a late decisive move — sometimes seemingly from nowhere — around this time in the race.
But it would be hard for him to pull off such a surge against so many well-established candidates in a crowded media environment.
At least for now, his numbers do not put him in a strong position over all. He has no substantial support in recent Iowa or New Hampshire polls, despite considerable ad spending there, including a 4 percent showing in a Monmouth poll of New Hampshire released on Thursday.
Without a breakthrough in one of the first two states, he might find it hard to sustain or improve upon his position elsewhere. The candidates who fare best in those two states will benefit from positive and intense media coverage, and Mr. Steyer would be all but absent from that conversation. At the same time, those winning candidates would turn their financial and organizational resources toward Nevada and South Carolina, where Mr. Steyer would be at risk of losing ground.
Even if he did manage to win South Carolina or Nevada, he would have very little time to expand his limited support to a winning national coalition on Super Tuesday on March 3 and beyond.
He is at 2 percent in national polls, and he would not have much time — less than two weeks from Super Tuesday in Nevada’s case and a mere three days after South Carolina — to capitalize on a hypothetical win in one of these states.
Mr. Bloomberg has already been spending millions on advertisements in the Super Tuesday states. One wonders whether he has already seized the inside path to winning the kinds of voters likeliest to be lured by television advertisements.