Warren's Gain In Support Is NOT At Biden's Expense

Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight.com, has written an interesting post about Elizabeth Warren's recent gains in support for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Here is part of what he wrote:

I just want to make a narrower point: Joe Biden is still doing reasonably well in the polls.

Elizabeth Warren’s doing well, too! She probably hasn’t overtaken Biden in national polls, yet, but it’s pretty darn close — close enough that she was momentarily ahead in one national polling average (from RealClearPolitics) last week. You’d certainly rather be in Warren’s shoes than Biden’s in Iowaand New Hampshire. (Although not in South Carolina, and the Super Tuesday states aren’t so clear.) In fact, if you want to argue that she’s the most likely nominee, I don’t have any real problem with that. I also don’t have any real problem if you think it’s Biden, or that it’s too close to call.

But Warren’s gains have come mostly at the expense of the rest of the field— from Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, in particular — and from other candidates, such as Cory Booker, whose campaigns never really took off in the first place. Relatively little of Warren’s increased support has come from Biden, whose topline numbers have mostly been steady.

In fact, Biden’s numbers haven’t declined at all since President Trump’s phone call with Ukraine became the dominant political story. We can see this by taking a before and after comparison of polls that have come out in the past couple of weeks. It’s hard to pinpoint an exact date when Ukraine and impeachment rose to the top of the news. But Monday, September 23, when seven first-term Democratic members of Congress published an editorial calling for Trump’s impeachment over allegations that he encouraged Ukraine to investigate Biden and and his son, was probably the closest thing to an inflection point. . . .

I don’t necessarily buy that Warren pulled ahead of Biden last week, as the RCP average briefly showed; for some reason, RCP’s average didn’t include HarrisX, which is usually one of Biden’s better polls. It’s also sort of a moot point, though. There’s no national primary, and if Warren keeps gaining ground at the rate she has been over the past few months, she’ll surpass Biden eventually.

What there hasn’t been, though, is much sign of a decline in Biden’s numbers, despite all the media narratives constantly predicting one.