Nate Silver Bulletpoint: Only Two Meaningful Shifts Have Happened In The Democratic Primary So Far

[highplainsdem]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bulletpoint-two-meaningful-things-have-happened-in-the-democratic-primary-so-far/

The debates aside, you generally shouldn’t be sweating day-to-day changes in the polls, at least not until we get much closer to the Iowa caucuses. There’s just way too much campaign left — and when candidates get a bounce in the polls, they usually revert to the mean within a few weeks anyway.

Measuring movement over the course of months is more meaningful, however. So let’s do something simple: compare where the Democratic candidates stand in an average of national polls now with where they were at the end of the previous quarter, on March 31.

Two big, obvious things have happened. One is that Elizbeth Warren has gained at Bernie Sanders’s expense. Contrary to the claims made by the Sanders campaign, it’s not just “manufactured media narratives” that have Warren surging or Sanders slumping. Instead, that’s what you get if you make any effort to look at an average or cross-section of polls instead of cherry-picking, although the shifts have been fairly gradual.

The other trend is that Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg have swapped places. At the end of March, O’Rourke was at 9.3 percent and Buttigieg was at 2.6 percent; now, it’s Buttigieg at 7.7 percent and O’Rourke at 3.6 percent.

As much as you sometimes need to be careful of going overboard with the concept of “lanes” in the Democratic primary, these shifts seem consistent with the lanes that everyone expected. Sanders and Warren are competing for left-leaning voters. And Buttigieg’s rise has been a challenge for O’Rourke given some of their surface similarities as youngish white guy “outsiders” who are liberal but not too liberal.

-snip-

As Silver points out in that column and in a tweet about it, "everyone else, including Biden, is in basically the same position" they were in at the end of March.

Link to tweet

[Gothmog]

1. The Washington Post agrees with Nate

I am amused that sanders is so upset but sanders claim that moderate Democrats are the reason for Warren's rise is false. sanders is losing liberal members of the party https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/19/sanders-wants-democrats-think-that-warrens-gains-are-function-moderates-they-arent/?utm_term=.d25c4a40d7a0

Shortly before that poll came out, Sanders’s campaign lifted up a report from Politico that seemed as though it might help explain Warren’s improved position: She was gaining support from what Sanders called “the corporate wing” of the Democratic Party. Which is to say the party’s more moderate, less progressive arm, the segment of the party that, in Sanders’s framing, will pull out all the stops to curtail his economic revolution.....

It doesn’t take much reading between the lines here to understand Sanders’s argument: Centrists are circling around Warren (per Politico) because they are afraid of legitimate progressive positions like his own.

Setting aside the question of how robustly Sanders’s big-ticket policies differ from Warren’s, there’s another, bigger problem with that argument: It’s not what polls show is happening.

Link to tweet

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And so it does. In Monmouth’s polls over the past few months, Warren’s surge has been a function of voters who identify as liberals. In April, she earned 8 percent of the vote among those who identify as liberal. In the new poll, she moved into a tie with former vice president Joe Biden.

Biden’s in the overall lead in national primary polling because he fares much better than Warren, Sanders or anyone else among more moderate Democrats. In the most recent poll, Biden gets 40 percent of the moderate vote to Sanders’s 10 percent and Warren’s 6.