I played with the numbers of the January 22 and March 4-5 DKOS straw polls. Here’s what I came up with.
The January 22 Straw poll saw about 35,000 respondents. The March 4-5 poll, as I write this comment, has over 92,600 respondents, a 265% increase.
Here’s the snapshot of the final results of the January 22 poll:
And here's a snapshot of the march 4-5 poll
To stay even, all of the candidates should have shown a 265% increase in the number of votes. Here’s what happened:
Bernie Sanders went from about 4800 votes in January to over 51,000, a more than 1000% increase.
Joe Biden went from 4479 to 7171, a 60% increase
Beto O’Rourke went from 2832 to 3599 votes, a 27% increase..
Kamala Harris had about 9200 votes in the January 22 Straw poll, compared to about 9800 in this poll about an 8% increase
Elizabeth Warren went from 6409 in January to 6582, less than a 3% increase.
Bernie Sanders saw a an increase in support sixteen times Joe Biden’s, the candidate with a significant showing and increase.
These straw polls are not scientific. They show supporter enthusiasm and the ability of campaigns to GOTV— get out the vote. It is massively easier to get someone to click on an online straw poll than it is to get people to actually get out and vote in a primary.
An impartial Democratic leadership would see this as an abject failure of every other declared or undeclared candidate to influence this poll, and a sign of the potential Bernie Sanders brings to the table. And note that I did not receive anything from the Sanders campaign about voting in this poll.
This suggests to me that the Bernie Sanders base is incredibly powerful. If the Democratic party gets behind him, the potential for building energy, hope and enthusiasm is profoundly more powerful than what Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Beto O'Rourke, Elizabeth Warren or any other candidate have shown they have to offer.