Has Bernie Sanders already peaked?

Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh said Sanders’ support has passed its peak after an early bump of soft support due to residual name recognition from his 2016 run, when he gave eventual nominee Hillary Clinton a tougher fight than originally expected. This year, as voters get to know the crowded presidential field better, other candidates are eating into his support, Marsh said.

“The biggest threat to Bernie Sanders right now is Elizabeth Warren, and you can see that in the polling,” Marsh told the Washington Examiner.

In addition to inching up above Sanders nationally in the Economist/YouGov poll, Warren leads Sanders in key early state polls. Monmouth poll of Nevada Democratic caucus voters released last week found Warren with 19% to Sanders’ 13%, and a Post and Courier poll of South Carolina Democratic primary voters released Sunday showed Warren at 17% while Sanders had 9%.

Warren proposes liberal policies such as a wealth tax on households worth more than $50 million and signals support for the Sanders-championed “Medicare for all” plan, which would create a single-payer healthcare system and eliminate private insurance. But unlike Sanders, she calls herself a capitalist at heart.

Attendees at the Iowa Democratic Party Hall of Fame forum earlier this month, where 19 presidential candidates spoke, told the Washington Examiner that Sanders, 77, is no longer the fresh force that he was in 2016.

“I used to be a Bernie Sanders supporter but I just, I’m kind of ready for a new face,” said 28-year-old Sarah Lemke of Des Moines. Now, Lemke likes Warren, 69. “I think that she has a lot of good messaging and branding,” she said. “I know from her history that she can get things done.”

Fredrick Jones, a 69-year-old retired Cedar Rapids resident, said that while he found both Sanders and Warren to be strong candidates, he plans to back Warren in the Iowa caucuses in February. “She needs to get on the debate stages and be heard by American people,” Jones said. “She will captivate the imagination of a whole lot of young people and a lot of women.”

Republican strategist John Thomas, however, said that Sanders should not panic yet. “There are a lot of votes that are probably going to fall off from Biden that Bernie can pick up,” Thomas told the Washington Examiner, adding that a winning candidate in a crowded field may only need to reach the mid-to-high 20% polling range to secure a good chance at the Democratic presidential nomination.

Sanders can set himself apart from Warren and other candidates by portraying himself as “the original firebrand,” Thomas said, arguing that Bernie is a candidate like Trump in the sense that voters support him as a way to “channel” their anti-establishment “rage.”

The Vermont senator has already made an effort to distinguish himself in a crowded field. Last week, Sanders delivered a speech in Washington, D.C. in which he defined his socialist vision and proposed a “21st century economic bill of rights,” which includes rights to “a decent job that pays a living wage,” affordable housing, and healthcare.

Sanders publicly brushes off his drop in the polls. “Polls go up and polls go down,” he said in a Fox News interview on Sunday, instead highlighting the portion of the Fox News poll that showed Sanders 9 points ahead of President Trump in a head-to-head match-up.

Marsh, however, said it’s doubtful Sanders bouncing back against his competitors, arguing that his socialist pitch shows that Sanders is in a “perilous situation” trying to hold on to his base.

“To go from the force that he was in 2016 to this in 2019 going in to 2020 — you don’t recover from that,” Marsh said.