Thirty percent of respondents to the poll, which was run on November 5 and 6 (the latter being Election Day), said they would choose "none of the above" over a list of Democrats widely suspected to be preparing to throw their hats into the gauntlet that is to be the 2020 opposition party's primary race, after which the winner will face off with the Republican candidate, presumably President Donald Trump.
Polling at a close second with 25 percent was former Vice President Joe Biden. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, California Senator Kamala Harris, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (the eighth wealthiest man in America) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were also included as options in the poll.
Clinton, who faced off with Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries in a race that many have condemned as rigged, polled at just 12 percent. In October, Clinton said she would "like to be president" still, a remark which overshadowed a racist joke she told in the same interview about Booker and former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder.
Sanders, who enjoyed the title of the most popular active politician in the United States for a time after the presidential election concluded, managed to pick up 18 percent of poll respondents' votes for the top pick. Given the disparity between the November 2018 poll and the 2017 one which anointed him to that position, it is possible that the former candidate has a more bipartisan base of supporters than others on the poll.
He's also received far less coverage in the media compared Booker and Harris, who made headlines for their fiery performances during the hearings preceding the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
In terms of recent media attention as it relates to the poll, Warren may have taken a hit after she released a DNA test showing that there is "strong evidence" that she had at least one Native American ancestor, likely in the 19th century. She had claimed in the 1980s in the directory at Harvard Law School that she was a minority, which Native Americans, Trump and others had called out as gaming the system.
Warren's decision to release the "evidence" was widely seen as an effort to rebuke Trump, who had dubbed her "Pocahontas." It may have backfired, however, as the Cherokee Nation quickly condemned the move, and polls conducted shortly afterward found that just a little more than a third of Democratic respondents found her actions to be appropriate.
Bloomberg and Harris polled at 4 percent, while Booker was the favorite choice of just 3 percent of respondents.
