2020 Democratic presidential primary power ranking

With 24 declared candidates in the race, the Democratic the 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 in the field, INSIDER has been conducting a recurring SurveyMonkey Audience national poll. You can download every single poll here, down to the individual respondent data.

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

At this point in the race, we’re mainly interested in using our polling to figure out:

• What percentage of Democratic voters are familiar with each candidate in the first place.
• How Democrats rate each candidate’s chances of beating President Donald Trump in a general election match-up.
• If a given candidate were to drop out of the race, who their supporters would flock to next.

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

We switched our ranking up a bit for the weeks of June 14 and June 24 as we got a much clearer sense of who will be on the stage for the first Democratic debates on June 26 and June 27, and as the Democratic National Committee released updated criteria for the second round of debates in September requiring candidates to obtain 130,000 individual donors and reach 2% in at least four polls.

The new requirements have stratified the field of candidates into three distinct tiers within our ranking: the top candidates who are guaranteed a spot on the stage for the first debates and will almost definitely qualify for those in the fall, the bottom set of candidates who are highly unlikely to make either, and the middle tier for whom the next few months will make or break their campaigns.

Read more: The DNC just made it harder to get on the debate stage and the crowded field of candidates could get a lot smaller very soon

Now that the debate stage is set, we’re in a holding pattern this week until after the debates for the middle and bottom tiers of the field but saw some movement at the top. Thanks to Sen. Cory Booker‘s smart strategic move in denouncing Biden’s controversial comments on segregation without overplaying his hand, we upgraded Booker and downgraded former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

We also downgraded all five candidates who cited Abraham Lincoln as their political heroes in The New York Times’ recent 18 questions series for lack of originality and creativity, meaning Sen. Michael Bennet, O’Rourke, former Rep. John Delaney, Buttigieg, and former Gov. John Hickenlooper all fell by one spot.

Here’s what our ranking looks like as of June 24, 2019.