Warren’s rise in the polls isn’t from Joe Biden who remains the leader…

That’s what Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight is writing about this morning….

Joe Biden’s poll numbers have been consistent and he actually continues to lead the contest for the nomination even as Elizabeth Warren gains on him…

She pecked in a few polls last week….

But right after a few polls came out with a sizable lead again….

But Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris HAVE  lost in the polls…..

His loss and few others are Warren’s gains….

Again?

Joe Biden is fighting a media headwind….

We’ve been busy the past few weeks tracking public opinion on impeachment, launching our new NBA metric (RAPTOR!) and dealing with about a million breaking news alerts a day. So I’m not going to give you one of those grandiose overviews of the Democratic primary. Maybe we’ll be more in the mood for one after this week’s debate.

Nope, 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. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came out in favor of an impeachment inquiry the next day; that Wednesday, the White House published its summary of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.) So here are the results from nine pollsters who have conducted a national poll since Sept. 23.¹

National Democratic primary polls since Sept. 23

Average results of Democratic primary candidates in national polls conducted after Sept. 23, 2019, op-ed calling for Trump’s impeachment

CANDIDATE	FOX	HAR	YG	Q’PAC	M.C.	IBD	IPSOS	MON.	DFP	AVG
Biden	32%	36%	25%	26%	33%	26%	21%	25%	23%	27.4
Warren	22	16	28	29	21	27	15	28	36	24.7
Sanders	17	14	13	16	19	10	16	15	15	15.0
Buttigieg	4	6	5	4	5	7	4	5	6	5.1
Harris	5	6	5	3	6	3	4	5	5	4.7
Yang	2	2	3	3	3	3	3	2	3	2.7
O’Rourke	3	3	1	1	3	2	2	1	2	2.0
Booker	2	2	1	2	2	0	1	1	2	1.4
Klobuchar	2	1	2	2	1	1	1	1	1	1.3
Castro	1	2	1	1	1	1	0	1	0	1.0
Gabbard	1	0	1	0	1	1	1	0	1	0.7
Steyer	1	1	1	0	1	0	0	1	0	0.6

In an average of those polls, Biden’s still on top at 27.4 percent, with Warren in second at 24.7 percent. 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….

More….

Note….

RCP often excludes certain polls in its average for some strange reason….

image…NBCNews.Com