Democrats Aren't Quite Ready For Their Primary To End

Bernie, stay just a little bit longer.
Democrats don't want to wave goodbye to the Clinton-Sanders show.
Democrats don't want to wave goodbye to the Clinton-Sanders show.
Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Democrats still want the primary race to continue, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds, although most think that only Hillary Clinton has a realistic shot at winning their party's nomination.

Forty-two percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters say that neither of their party's remaining candidates for president should drop out. Thirty-seven percent want Sen. Bernie Sanders to make his exit, while 15 percent harbor the unlikelier dream of Clinton deciding to quit.

The percentage who think that Sanders should drop out has risen sharply since late April, when a HuffPost/YouGov survey found that just one-fifth wanted him to go. Fifty-five percent say now that only Clinton has a real chance of becoming the nominee.

Clinton's polling numbers against presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump have recently dipped -- likely in part because he's clinched the GOP nomination, while the Democratic primary soldiers on. But that shift notwithstanding, Democrats still see Clinton as their stronger general election candidate. Forty percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters say that only Clinton could win the presidency, while 40 percent think that either Clinton or Sanders could win, and just 14 percent think that only Sanders can win.

Other recent polling has also shown Democratic primary voters largely at peace with the continuing contest between Clinton and Sanders. By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, they think a primary that lasts through June is more likely to help than hurt the party, a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found. That's a shift from April 2008, when Democrats were more likely to worry that Clinton's candidacy was damaging the prospects for then-Sen. Barack Obama's victory.

The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted May 20 to May 23 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.

The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls.You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.

Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.

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