This is the fourth post in a series that began here and continued here and here.
Two simple charts for you today as Warren catches Biden and, in many polls, surpasses him through late September and the first of October. This is especially significant because all available polling took place before news of Bernie Sanders’ heart attack and before the potential stain of Biden’s involvement with his son and Ukraine has had a chance to latch onto the national imagination. To be fair, it’s not totally clear how these events will impact the race.
One imagines that Sanders’ heart attack will cast a long shadow on both Biden and Sanders as old, frail, and especially vulnerable. I don’t here mean to be callous – I love Bernard Sanders deeply and I wish nothing but the best for him and his future longevity. Indeed, however, this love propels me to believe he should exit the race for the presidency so he can survive the next 13 months. I share no such love of Joe Biden, but I also feel his lifespan would be better served by a departure from the primary race. Admittedly, Bernie’s plucky survival and vow to keep running may inspire a mini-surge of support, but I think the long-term trend will not be positive for he or Biden as a result of this health incident.
Ukraine is more complicated – Biden is desperately trying to spin Trump’s actions against he and his son as fear of a Biden candidacy that means Democrats should bet on Joe. I don’t find this argument compelling because, if nothing else, candidates are notoriously bad at guessing who their best and worst opponents are. (Remember when everyone thought Bill Clinton had single-handedly convinced Trump to run and that this was a masterstroke of political machination? Weird how no one talks about that anymore.) But this line of argumentation might work for some voters since so many Democrats are so automatically knee-jerk against Trump that they will do the opposite of whatever they think he wants. Is this eighth-dimensional chess akin to “don’t throw me in the briar patch?” Unclear. Probably Trump is a blunter object than that at this stage and not that sophisticated; I suspect he’s just falling for premature general election polling that somehow poses a corrupt and clumsy 76-year-old as a threat to his regime. But it’s too early to know.
In any case, as the race rapidly narrows to three or even two people (Harris is now often falling below Buttigieg and Buttigieg himself hasn’t made double-digits in any polls since June 4th), I wanted to take a look at the apples-to-apples polling picture of Biden vs. Warren heads-up. Warren has passed Biden in four recent polls from three separate outfits, so it now makes sense to put the two on the same graph to illustrate both their relative standing as well as their momentum.
In this graph, we see Biden (gray) and Warren (green) with all their various polling data – each line represents one separate poll. They aren’t labeled in a key or differentiated because there are fifteen separate polling outfits with multiple data points on this chart and I’m trying to reduce noise, not increase it:
And, to take a further crack at reducing the noise to get an overall picture of trends, here is a simplified version of the chart above, only showing first and last polls to get a snapshot of change over time from early June till now:
While that second chart omits some data, I think it gives a very clear and stark image of how these two actually campaign against each other on a national stage. And there’s every indication that Warren has been outperforming Biden by a higher margin in Iowa and New Hampshire than nationally up till this point. For better or for worse, all the other early primary contests take their cues from these two opening states. In the modern primary era (since 1972), only Bill Clinton has won either party’s nomination without winning either Iowa or New Hampshire – and he was running against an Iowan (Tom Harkin, who got 77% of the vote and all of the delegates there) in the former. Ask yourself: does Joe Biden have the charisma, charm, and energy of 1992 Bill Clinton to stage such a comeback?
