Once Biden Implodes Where Will All Those Low-Info Voters Go?

Trump's Dream Come True-- A Ticket To A Second Term

Anecdotally, it appears that significant numbers of Biden supporters are looking for another candidate to back. And the RealClearPolitics polling averages are starting to, ever so slightly, slip for Biden. His national polling peak was on May 8 when he hit 41.4. A week later it started a downward trend. By May 22, he was at 34.7%, still way ahead of anyone else. On June 5, Biden was at 33.5% and last week he had ticked down to 31.9%.

Back on May 8, Bernie was at 14.6% and Elizabeth Warren was at 8.0. Last week Bernie, after some up and down action, was at 15.0, while Elizabeth Warren had gone up to 11.9%. There is no one else near double digits. Morning Consult releases weekly numbers for the early states that include second choices. Overall, Biden, Bernie and Warren are the only ones in double digits:

• Biden- 38%
• Bernie- 19%
• Warren- 11%

They report that if Biden implodes, 29% of his voters will go to Bernie, while 13% will go to Kamala Harris and 13% will go to Elizabeth Warren. Voters are not choosing second choices based on ideology. For example, 33% of Bernie supporters say they’d go with Biden and just 21% would go with Elizabeth Warren. Warren supporters pick Kamala Harris as their second choice (22%), followed by Bernie (19%) and Biden (19%).

In any case, BuzzFeed political reporter Ruby Cramer reported Monday that the PCCC has launched a new website to help Elizabeth Warren pick up deserting Biden supporters. PCCC’s Adam Green contends that Biden supporters “are ready to bolt.”

That’s part of the premise behind a new effort by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, launched on Monday morning, to highlight and collect information from Democratic primary voters who previously supported another candidate or identified as undecided, but made the move to Warren after seeing her “in action” on the trail. The website, Switch to Warren will focus in large part on Biden supporters concerned most about nominating the candidate best positioned to defeat President Trump.

“They don't need an excuse,” Green said of Biden voters, citing Warren’s recent rise in the polls. “The moment they get a sense that he's not the best to go against Trump, they won't need any further permission to leave Biden for somebody else… People think Warren's challenge is how to take a bunch of Bernie supporters. The two big honeypots for Warren are actually Biden supporters and undecided voters, all of whom are electability voters looking to go with somebody who can inspire voters in the general election.”

The “Switch to Warren” effort, which asks newly converted supporters to detail their reasons for changed their minds, will make the case that primary voters have been surprised by the Warren they meet on the trail: where the public might know her as a Harvard professor, or “a wonk,” said Green, they hear her talk at campaign events about growing up working-class in Oklahoma, or struggling as a single mother, or working in bankruptcy law on the same issues that now inform her campaign policy proposals.

But the new project is also a sign that the group is willing to use its membership of nearly 1 million people to challenge Biden and the widely held perception that he’d be the safest choice in a general election.

So far, Green said, they’ve collected testimonials from voters who have switched to Warren from Biden and Sanders both in states like Ohio, Georgia, and California.

In Warren’s political orbit, the PCCC occupies a place on the close periphery— enough on this inside to work in lockstep with her aims, enough on the outside to amplify her causes, promote her name, and pressure her rivals with a more aggressive posture than Warren herself would take.

In 2013, when a new wave of progressive energy began to sweep over the Democratic Party, they blanketed social media with a new slogan, “I’m From The Elizabeth Warren Wing Of The Party,” to brand it in her name. In 2016, while she worked behind the scenes to push her policy agenda with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, they were there to do the same in public. And in 2019, as she set herself apart from a growing field of presidential candidates by vowing to abstain from high-dollar fundraisers, they loudly pressed others to do the same, helping Warren define the terms of the primary in her own progressive image.

The group, which endorsed Warren on the first day of her presidential bid on New Year’s, works in coordination with the campaign, Green said, “to utilize our biggest resource, our membership, and argue for the rationale of Warren's candidacy.”

The candidate, meanwhile, has little to say about polling or her strategy as it pertains to the rest of the primary field.

“It's way too early to talk about polls,” she said earlier this month when a reporter tried to ask in South Carolina.

“I get a chance to talk about what's broken in America, how we can fix it and build a grassroots movement to get that done. And I get to do it every day.”

The backers of the conservative lane are hoping if Biden self-destructs, his supporters switch the McKinsey Pete but if Monday was any indication, it looks like Pete could drop out even before Biden does! Then they're stuck with Klobuchar or something really untenable, like Frackenlooper. Or could this be why Sestak just jumped in... not that the establishment has ever been all that fond of him. Still, for them, anything is better than Bernie.