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Surging in Polls, Elizabeth Warren Now Has a Path to the Nomination
Recent polls have clearly indicated that Warren is going places. Ed Kilgore, NY Mag., Common Dreams, Aug. 9, 2019.
In this phase of the 2020 Democratic presidential contest, there are a number of interesting story lines for political observers: the huge candidate field that keeps resisting its “winnowing,” the apparent indestructibility of front-runner Joe Biden, the constant fears about electability and Trump’s efforts to paint the Donkey Party as a bunch of socialists who hate America and love open borders, and the intermittently sharp elbows the candidates are displaying toward each other.
But the development that currently demands attention is the emergence of Senator Elizabeth Warren as something other than the candidate of policy wonks, dismissed as nonviable even among people who think she’d make an outstanding president. Her strong debate performances, a knack for organizing (based on her outstanding retail political skills), and the misfortunes affecting some of her rivals have combined to give her the clear path to the Democratic nomination that she really did not have in the early going.
Recent polls have clearly indicated that Warren is going places. The RealClearPolitics national polling averages show her as basically tied with Bernie Sanders for second place with Joe Biden’s lead narrowing. The two most recent national polls (from Quinnipiac and Economist–You Gov) place her seven and five points, respectively, ahead of Sanders. Just as important, she’s gaining strength in the early states. A new Monmouth poll from Iowa places her ten points ahead of Bernie, and just nine points behind Biden, in a state where everyone concedes she has the best organization. In New Hampshire polls, where Biden’s early lead was less formidable, she’s nipping at Sanders’s heels. Warren is in a similar position in Nevada (which holds its caucuses 11 days after the New Hampshire primary), where Politico reported yesterday that she has already built a “monster” of an organization.
Warren is also clearly making gains in her implicit rivalry with her friend and ally Bernie Sanders for the affections of self-consciously progressive voters, even as she maintains some potential as a party-unifying figure that Bernie may lack thanks to leftover bad memories of his 2016 campaign. In that recent national Quinnipiac survey, she trounced Sanders among “very liberal” voters and actually led him among those under the age of 35.
Whether or not you think Sanders is losing strength (there’s evidence pointing in both directions on that proposition), it is clear that Warren is benefiting from the erosion in Kamala Harris’s support, which probably reflects both the dissipation of the buzz she commanded after the first round of debates and her widely panned performance in the second. Harris’s national polling average has dropped from 15 to 8 percent in the last month. And perhaps just as important, she’s showing little or no progress in taking away Joe Biden’s overpowering position among African-American voters, central to the Obama Redux strategy she is relying on. Quinnipiac gives her just one percent of the black vote nationally. A somewhat older Monmouth survey of South Carolina showed Harris with 12 percent of African-American support in what for her is a key state, where a majority of Democratic primary voters are black — but Joe Biden had 51 percent.
Put all that together with the inability of any candidates outside the Big Four of Biden, Warren, Sanders, and Harris to gain any momentum at all, and for the first time you can clearly see a plausible path to the nomination for Warren...There are certainly other pitfalls ahead for Elizabeth Warren. She needs to continue her recent fundraising success; despite outraising Sanders in the second quarter, she still can’t match his durable small-dollar machine and could well be outgunned by Biden, who has none of her inhibitions against passing the hat among wealthy donors. The high expectations she has set as a debater will add pressure to her performances in the September and October sessions. And most of all, as Aaron Blake points out, she needs to shake doubts about her electability:...
Read More, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/09/surging-polls-elizabeth-warren-now-has-path-nomination
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