Buttigieg has taken supporters from Warren, not Biden [View all]

[brooklynite]

The Crosstab

While Washington analysts and TV pundits spouted off about the threat a Pete Buttigieg rise might pose to Joe Biden, a more predictable thing occurred: Elizabeth Warren’s collapse in the polls. Some have explained her declining poll numbers with a poor roll-out of her Medicare for All plan, while others pointed to a poor debate performance in October as the catalyst for her decline.

It seems reasonable to me that either one of those things could be the driving factor, but yet another lurks somewhere in pundit-world: that educated and liberal whites found a new favorite child—Pete Buttigieg—in their search for an alternative to Joe Biden.

It is chiefly interesting that Buttigieg has risen in national polls while Warren has sunk. Take a look at The Economist’s polling average for more on this. But we see the same pattern in Iowa and New Hampshire, per aggregation from RealClearPolitics. This is important because both NH and IA have a relatively high proportion of white liberal Democrats compared to the nation as a whole.

This suggests to me that much of the conventional wisdom about Buttigieg—that his opposition to Medicare for All made him a good “moderate” alternative to Biden—is wrong. This is yet another reminder that primaries are not as cookie-cutter as we often believe.