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Is Warren over?

Just two months ago, Elizabeth Warren appeared to have the strongest and most consistent growth momentum in the field. Her polling broke into double digits consistently during the summer and continued rising until she pulled even with Joe Biden in October. Now, however, Reuters reports that her numbers have tumbled in their latest Ipsos poll back into single digits — and they’re not alone:

Support for U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren dropped nationally to its lowest level in four months, and nearly one in three potential Democratic primary voters say they do not know which candidate to pick with the first nominating contests less than two months away, according to a Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll. …

Support dropped by 2 percentage points for former Vice President Joe Biden to 19%. It fell by 3 points for U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont to 14%, and it declined by 1 point to 6% for Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.

Bloomberg, a billionaire media mogul, entered the race as the fifth-most popular candidate with 4% support.

Support for Warren dropped by 2 points to 9% in the national poll, the worst showing for the U.S. senator from Massachusetts in the Reuters/Ipsos poll since August.

The nine percent result includes independents likely to vote in a Democratic primary, and that’s where Warren’s biggest trouble lies. Among those independents, Warren only scored 3% — which puts her behind Biden (12%), Buttigieg (6%), Sanders (5%), and even Michael Bloomberg (4%). Warren’s tied with Andrew Yang among Democrat-voting independents. Among only Democrats, Warren comes in third at 13%, but that’s thirteen points below Joe Biden.

Warren also scores third overall as a second choice candidate, but fourth among independents. Who comes in third? Bloomberg. Warren appears to have a major problem with independent voters, and that’s going to be a yuuuuge problem if she ends up winning the nomination.

Not that there seems to be much hope of that. It’s dangerous to rely on one poll to declare someone in trouble, but … it’s not just one poll, either. Warren has been collapsing in the RealClearPolitics aggregate polling averages for two months, a sharp decline that hasn’t yet caught much media attention. She’s the brown line:

At her peak on October 9th, Warren’s national polling average hit 26.8%, virtually tied with Joe Biden at 27%. Her average today is 14.2%, a decline of almost half that support in less than two months. Warren’s collapse is easily the most dynamic movement in Democratic national polling in that time, far more dynamic than Pete Buttigieg’s much-more-heralded rise in polling over the last month.

However, Buttigieg seems to be the only one benefiting at the moment from Warren’s misfortune, and even then not all that much. Bernie Sanders hasn’t benefited from it at all. It appears that Warren’s voters have tried her for a while and have begun to abandon her for no one in particular. Reuters calculates the undecideds at 31%, with 41% of independents still mulling over their choices. Those are rather high numbers after a full year of campaigning, and with just a couple of months left to go.

Note, however, that Biden still keeps ticking — almost literally. His polling numbers continue their vacillation between 25-30%, looking like a heartbeat on an EKG. Biden might be the only Democrat with a heartbeat at the moment. In the end, Biden’s the one who benefits from the collapse of his competitors, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of enthusiasm for him, either. Democrats appear to be putting their own voters to sleep, and that bodes very ill for them in November — especially with other voters getting angrier and angrier over impeachment.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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