Joe Biden seems to be in the catbird seat as Democrat poll after Democrat poll show him persistently in the lead. It makes sense because so much of the Democratic field is populated with crazies. When the choice is between hapless old Joe, hopelessly anchored to the Obama administration, yet still with no endorsement from the Great One himself for the Democratic faithful, and the current crop of far-left Soviet-style lunatics, the choice is obvious, at least for a large chunk of Democrats. Joe's the winner. The RealClearPolitics average of polls currently shows Joe Biden with a comfortable 5.2 point lead over his Democrat rivals.

But, oops, not so fast. Turns out reporters David Brady and Brett Parker at RealClearPolitics have spotted some bad news within that trend for Biden.

Apparently, every time a rival drops out - the voters they had move over to someone else. Anyone but Biden.

They found a YouGov poll that showed just that trend:

To gain insight into this question, the latest YouGov polls asked respondents likely to vote in Democratic primaries to name both their first and second choices for the nomination. In the most recent survey, Joe Biden leads on first-choice ballots, followed by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris. So what happens to the horse race when we add in the second choices of potential voters? The short answer is that Joe Biden hemorrhages support....

See their chart here.

So it turns out the Democratic voter base has a lot of far-left people, and as a result, they're turned off by the supposedly moderate Biden. He doesn't look moderate to us, but by their standards, he's what passes for moderate. Plus, quite a few of them probably don't like the swamp stuff. A publicly posted YouGov poll (I suspect the RCP-cited one on second-choices is not public because I couldn't find it), shows that Biden has lost considerable support for his involvement in the Ukraine fiasco, where all the attention is supposed to be on President Trump. They see that $80,000 no-show job Hunter Biden got as a result of dad's influence and must be as disgusted as the rest of us.

Democrats are now dropping out of the race like flies - the latest welcome one to implode looks as though it might be the loathesome Julian Castro, who didn't merit a spot at the next Democratic debate. Good riddance. And now his supporters will fan out to other Democratic candidates, anyone but Biden.

Not a good picture for Old Joe to look forward to. No wonder the betting pools are putting money down for Elizabeth Warren rather than Joe Biden - this, despite Biden's supposed lead in the polls.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0