Former Vice President Joe Biden in Washington, D.C., April 5, 2019 (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

Three is a trend: Joe Biden is polling at 38 percent in a Quinnipiac poll that was released on Tuesday afternoon, hours after CNN and Morning Consult, respectively, found Biden polling at 39 percent and 36 percent. Quinnipiac finds a 9-point jump for Biden since its last poll was conducted in March, while CNN shows an 11-point jump for Biden since then, and Morning Consult shows a 6-point improvement for Biden since the previous week.


Nate Silver notes that, while Biden’s bump will likely fade, “[w]ell-known candidates polling in the mid-30s in the early going are about even money to win the nomination, historically. Well-known candidates polling in the mid-to-high 20s have roughly a 1 in 4 shot, conversely.”

Typically, the press overestimates the likelihood that the early frontrunner will be a party’s presidential nominee, but when it comes to Biden the debate had been between those who think he has a reasonable chance of winning the nomination and those who think he has “almost no chance” or no chance at all. I’ve been in the former camp, and the latest round of polling should at least help put to rest the notion that Biden is just as weak of a frontrunner as Jeb Bush was in 2016 GOP primaries.

Bush never got above 18 percent in the national polling average, but 18 percent looks more like Biden’s floor than his ceiling in the Democratic primary. The new CNN poll finds that 36 percent of Democratic primary voters say they’ll definitely back the candidate they currently support, and those “who say they are locked in are more apt to back Biden: 50% in that group support him, 21% Sanders, 8% Warren.”


But any way you look at it, the nomination is still up for grabs. When a Washington Post poll that was released Sunday asked Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents for their preference in the primary (without giving respondents a list of names from which to choose), a majority of those voters (54 percent) had no opinion.