Washington pundits appear to have finally turned the corner this week on starting every conversation about Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy by questioning whether a woman is electable. Her slow but steady upward trend in the polls combined with Vice President's Joe Biden's slow but steady slope downward has finally convinced at least some professional analysts that Warren's gradual build could in fact be a strength not a weakness.
As Dave Weigel, one of the smarter and less group-thinky campaign reporters, noted, this week's CNN poll showing Biden as the frontrunner at 24% with Warren at 18% and Sanders at 17% is perhaps best viewed by where things began in April, when Biden first announced. By that measure, Biden's support has consistently eroded (-15 points) while the opposite is true for Warren (+10 points).
The NPR/PBS/Marist poll also took a different angle on the race, testing the favorability of the candidates rather than asking the same question pollsters have been asking for months: Who's your first choice? In terms of favorables, NPR's Domenico Montanaro concluded, "Warren is on the rise among Democratic voters." Indeed, Warren not only had higher favorables than Biden among Democrats and Democratic leaners (75% to Biden’s 71%), she also had lower unfavorables (11% to Biden's 22%). The other upside for Warren in the data is that she still has more room to grow since 15% of Democratic voters didn't know of her while only 7% said the same of Biden.
And frankly, for all the talk of Biden's electability in the general election, Warren's favorables among all voters were comparable to Biden's—they're both 1 point underwater and, again, Warren has more room to grow as 17% of voters don't know of her while only 9% weren't familiar with Biden.
Warren had other positive metrics headed into the debate, but let's skip to some initial post-debate polling where 538 and Ipsos interviewed a group of voters both before and after the debate. Warren had the highest favorables going into the debate, and “her performance was still rated higher than we’d expect based on her favorability alone," writes FiveThirtyEight.com. And here's a more simplistic metric—who gained and lost support. Warren gained more than any of her rivals (3.6 points), while both Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders slipped by about a point, give or take.
Warren’s generally positive numbers were all of a piece—they seemed to ring true while being backed up by separate but similar results in other polling. For Warren, it was a perfect outcome. She didn't need a big moment since she's already sitting comfortably within the top tier. Instead, she seems happy to consistently chip away at Biden's lead bit by little bit. That's why she was front and center during substantive parts of the debate but then was perfectly content to recede into the background when things got stickier. In fact, Warren stayed entirely silent for one 40-minute stretch of time.
One of the best pieces of post-debate punditry came from the sometimes acerbic Philippe Reines, a longtime adviser to Hillary Clinton, who argued that "only a woman can win a debate against Trump." Reines was Clinton's sparring partner during general election debate prep in 2016, so he has some keen insights into the differences between how women and men both debate and prepare to debate. His assessment was that pitting a man against Trump would turn into a chest-thumping machismo disaster.
“The men in this field—and men in general—are easier to rile up and are more likely to meet antagonization with aggression,” Reines wrote.
Women handle Trump better, he argued, using House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as Exhibit A before turning to the virtues of matching either California Sen. Kamala Harris or Warren against Trump. But while many people can imagine Harris the prosecutor eviscerating Trump, Reines said he thought people were underestimating Warren.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren is underappreciated as a potential Trump foe. She might have a narrower margin of victory relative to a hypothetical matchup with Trump compared with the other candidates, but dating back to 2017, she has weathered the most sustained attacks from him. And she has done it by remaining focused on her own plans and sticking with her strategy. I’d expect her to do the same when faced with those attacks on a debate stage—which she’s already thinking about. Last month, she said, “You don't back down from a bully. ... Nobody’s getting behind me on a debate stage and doing a handsy thing. That's not happening.” Hillary facing it last time allows a woman to confront it head-on next time.
The post-debate coverage held plenty of "Biden did great" hot takes. The Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan did by far the best beauty’s in the eye of the beholder recap of Biden's performance, ranging from absolutely 'disqualifying' reviews to positively 'presidential.’
But the number of serious analysts who began to frame Warren as a potential threat to Biden's frontrunner status was notable this week. Presently, the Real Clear Politics average of polls has Biden at 26.8%, Sanders at 17.3%, and Warren at 16.8%. If Warren were to gain, for instance, a point every two weeks between now and the end of the year, she would be sitting at a pretty 7 points or so higher heading into the first primary contests of next year. That modest gain is a completely plausible scenario in the last four months of this year given that she has gained some 10 points in the CNN poll since April. Entering next year in the mid-20s would also be pretty solid footing for someone who was sitting at single digits when Biden first announced in April.