Bill de Blasio's initial poll numbers for the Democratic presidential primary are alarmingly bad

Walt Hickey

May 20, 2019, 23:15 IST

Bill de Blasio's initial poll numbers for the Democratic presidential primary are alarmingly bad

Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/IPx

INSIDER has been polling about the Democratic field on a rolling basis since late last year.
Rather than asking who people most want to be the nominee, we're more interested in overlapping support.
We ask people if they'd be satisfied or dissatisfied with a person as nominee, and if they think that person would win or lose against President Trump in the general election.
It's still really early, but New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio received staggeringly bad numbers the first time we polled him.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio threw his hat in the ring last week and formally entered the Democratic primary campaign.

Despite testy relationships with the press on his home turf of New York, de Blasio believes his accomplishments on implementing universal pre-K education and his administration's management of the city make him well-poised for the election to come.

We added him to our recurring INSIDER poll conducted on an audience of national adults through SurveyMonkey Audience in the poll that ran from May 17-18, 2019. Though typically we want to wait until we run a candidate several times to draw conclusions about their candidacy, Bill de Blasio's numbers in the poll are alarmingly bad.

There were 1,168 total respondents, of whom 485 were American adults who said they'd likely participate in a Democratic primary and who were registered to vote. We'll want to get more data, but that's a fairly good sample to begin with.

AP Photo/Richard Drew

Protestors demonstrate outside "Good Morning America" as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife Chirlane McCray appear on the show,

Overall, half of respondents have heard of Bill de Blasio, with 248 (51%) saying they were aware of him. That's really good! That's a higher level of awareness than several candidates who have been running for quite some time, including New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

Here's the bad part for de Blasio:

Of those who have heard of him, 44% would not be satisfied with him as the nominee.
That is by far the highest dissatisfaction rate we observe of any Democrat at any time in this race.
Only 10% of those who have heard of him said they would be satisfied with him as nominee.

Effectively, de Blasio seems to register as a candidate who already has made an impact on half the potential voter base and for whom that impact was negative four times as often as it was positive.

People also don't think de Blasio would stand much of a chance against President Trump.

Just for a baseline, for a standard Democrat in the race, our poll found since March that 32% of primary voters think they'd beat Trump and 30% of those primary voters think they'd lose in the general.

Bill de Blasio was believed to beat Trump by a paltry 12% of primary voters and was said to lose to Trump by 49% of primary voters, a staggering figure for someone with de Blasio's name recognition.

Susan Watts-Pool/Getty Images

NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 4: New York Mayor Bill de Blasio eats lunch with fifth graders at P.S. 69 (Journey Prep School) on the first day of NYC public schools, September 4, 2014 in the Bronx borough of New York City. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is touring universal pre-kindergarten programs throughout the city.

Obviously there are caveats.

This is just one poll, and any one poll shouldn't be weighted too heavily. We'll keep running this question and will keep an eye on if this is a fluke for Hizzoner or if it's emblematic of a larger trend. If the name recognition weren't so high and the disparity so significant, we'd err on the side of wait and see.

Second, this is a survey of American adults, not Iowa or New Hampshire adults. Maybe the mayor of New York is really well-suited to crushing it in Iowa!

Either way, this is not exactly a great sign for the de Blasio campaign.