Should we pay attention to early 2020 polls? NateSilver538 says yes:
So it probably helps to distinguish the cases of Biden and Sanders. Biden leads the field by every polling-based metric: first-choice support, whether adjusted for name recognition or not, as well as in favorability ratings. He may not survive scrutiny if and when he officially declares for the race — he wasn’t a very good candidate when he ran for president in 1988 and 2008 — but he starts out with deep loyalty from a fairly broad spectrum of the Democratic base.
Sanders, conversely, has a high floor of support and a lot of enthusiasm behind him, but that’s tempered by having some Democrats — 25 percent in the Iowa poll — who have an unfavorable view of him. If that number holds at 25 percent — and the other 75 percent of Democrats would consider voting for Sanders — he shouldn’t have a lot of problems.
It will also be important to track whether Sanders can hold onto or further improve upon the bounce in first-choice support that he’s received since. Before then, Sanders was generally polling in the high teens or low 20s, but he’s since bounced into the mid-to-high 20s in first-choice support. That happens to be near an inflection point where a candidate goes from a weak front-runner to a more formidable one. As you can see from our 2011— with a chart that is decidedly not up to current FiveThirtyEight design standards — candidates who are only polling at 20 percent despite high name recognition in the early stage of the race are often paper tigers. But get up to 30 percent, and your chances of winning the nomination improve quite a bit.
To be clear, I don’t think you should be going solely or necessarily even mostly by the polls at this stage of the primary. There are lots of other quantitative and qualitative ways to evaluate the candidates;
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