Elsewhere in America, far from Washington, D.C., Joe Biden is fielding a set of problems unrelated to the fact that his son Hunter is being dragged into the flaming carousel of Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry. Namely that, according to several recent polls, Biden’s famed lead among 2020 Democrats has begun to fall in early states—not enough to truly threaten his position against his rivals and the sitting president, but enough to raise concerns over whether his front-runner status is truly assured.

The biggest cause of this, several pollsters and strategists told Politico, has been the rise of Elizabeth Warren in the voters’ consciousness. “Biden has a challenger now. He didn’t have one before,” said Ryan Tyson, a Florida-based pollster who released polls in three early states showing Biden in trouble. Since the last poll conducted in May, Biden is down 15 points in Florida, 18 in South Carolina, and 18 in New Hampshire. In fact, Warren now leads him in the Granite State by three points.

A Des Moines-Register/CNN poll in Iowa released on Saturday saw Warren pull ahead of Biden significantly for the first time; she’s now beating him 22% to 20%. And most importantly, according to pollster J. Ann Selzer, 32% of voters there say they’re “extremely enthusiastic” about caucusing for Warren, while only 22% say the same about Biden. “Biden’s favorability dropped, his unfavorable numbers doubled,” she noted. “In the absence of any context, it’s not bad. But Elizabeth Warren’s numbers are strikingly good.”

The common wisdom is that Biden’s lead is generally due to his name recognition—everyone knows who Biden is, and everyone likes him quite a bit already. (One data point supporting this theory are polls showing that Bernie Sanders is the second choice for Biden voters, and vice versa for Bernie voters.) But as Warren gets more publicity and defines her image as a nerdy proletariat with a knack for developing concrete plans to implement progressive policy, Biden’s current argument that he’s the perfect Trump antidote looks less relevant by the day, something a strategist for one of his Democratic rivals told my colleague Chris Smith as Biden’s gaffes reached a critical mass. “His campaign has done an excellent job staying on-message, hammering home that Trump is the issue and Biden is the most electable,” one strategist said. “But if you’re betting everything on electability, what happens if the perception of his electability starts to slip? Then he’s got nothing to stand on.”

Warren, on the other hand, has a platform so strong that it’s beginning to encroach into Sanders’s territory, snagging endorsements and beating him handily in the aforementioned polls. Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, warned that Warren’s message could soon overwhelm Biden’s power as a known quantity. “Biden’s support was always soft. That’s the key,” he told Politico. “Unlike some of the other candidates, Biden’s support isn’t as locked in. He doesn’t have that ‘it’ factor.”

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