Candidates have come and gone, but Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are forever.
In the ongoing 2020 Democratic presidential primary, RealClearPolitics puts the former vice president's polling average at 27.8 percent as of its last update on Dec. 19. Sanders, the Independent senator from Vermont, gets 19.3 percent, giving the two candidates almost exactly the same polling averages they had a year ago.
Yes, on Dec. 19, 2018, Biden had an average of 27.5 percent support for winning the 2020 nomination, while Sanders had 19 percent. It didn't matter that neither candidate had entered the presidential race yet, or that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was pretty much the only major candidate who had. Biden and Sanders have both seen spikes and drops in the year since, but with 2020 less than a week away, things are not really different than they were a year ago.
Those unchanging numbers come despite Warren's rise from 5 percent support a year ago to 15.2 percent support as of Dec. 19, and even though she briefly hit a level of polling nearly double Sanders' average back in October. Sen. Kamala Harris' (D-Calif.) and former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke both entered and exited the race without changing the top of the polls, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, despite his unexpected rise, failed to make it to the top spots either.
Anything could happen in 2020, but at this point ahead of the 2016 election, President Trump was the clear favorite.