The first post-Christmas poll of Iowa Democrats has come out, and it tells us something about where Elizabeth Warren was getting all that support back when she was the front-runner.
First off, this latest poll, a CBS News Battleground Tracker/YouGov, shows Warren clearly back in fourth place. The poll puts Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttgieg all at 23%, while Warren is down at 16%, with Amy Klobuchar registering at 7%.
Warren was at 22% in this same poll back in October. That’s a 6-point drop. Where are her supporters going? The polls give us a clue.
The only statistically significant rise among the big four in the YouGov Iowa polls since Labor Day has been Buttigieg’s climb from 14% to 23%. Sanders and Biden have moved less than 1 percentage point in each of the three polls.
This is a simpler version of the pattern you see if you look at all Iowa polls since Oct. 1. That bigger picture has an extra detail: a noticeable Sanders climb through the autumn and early winter. Biden is steady near the top in all these polls. Here’s the chart from Oct. 1 to today of the RealClearPolitics average in Iowa. (Sanders is blue, Warren is brown, Buttigieg is purple, and Biden is green.)
What does this all tell us? It tells us Warren’s base isn’t necessarily what some of us Beltway folks think it is.
Warren’s core support, especially at her peak in October, was a little bit socialist, sure, but it was largely what I call the “Connected Class” that might be spotted in wine caves.
Warren has a reputation in Washington as a populist who advocates socialism. Surely some of her base voters are enthusiastic for socializing health insurance (“Medicare for all”) and that sort of thing. That could explain the steady climb of Sanders alongside the steady fall for Warren in Iowa — she’s losing some socialists to Bernie.
But socialists were never her bread and butter. Warren has always relied heavily on the Connected Class. That includes doctors and lawyers, but, in general, it’s the larger class of college-educated white people. This may, in fact, have been the biggest chunk of her support.
At her Iowa peak, when Warren was leading the field in mid-October, she was getting about 33% of all college graduates according to an Iowa State University poll, while Buttigieg was pulling in about 19%.
Now, Buttigieg is winning the college-educated vote 26% to 24%, according to the Iowa State University poll in December. If you were to screen out those with graduate degrees, and look at those whose highest degree was a bachelor’s (which is about a quarter of the Democratic electorate), we’ve swung from a 14-point Warren lead in October to a 5-point Buttigieg lead at the New Year.
Warren is falling mostly because white, college-educated voters are leaving her for Buttigieg.
