A week after the last debate, the Real Clear Politics average of mid-September poll data is...

Biden: 28.8%
Warren: 18.3%
Sanders: 16.5%
Others: Single-digits

I highlight this because most of our contributors systematically post only survey data that shows Sanders leading Warren. As you can see, three out of the five national polls that have been conducted since the last debate instead show Warren leading Sanders.

In fact, the two post-debate polls out of Iowa (the first state to vote) I've seen both indicate Warren to be serious competition for Biden in that state at this point!

One new Iowa survey:

Warren: 24%
Biden: 16%
Sanders: 16%
Buttigieg: 13%

The other:

Biden: 25%
Warren: 23%
Buttigieg: 12%
Sanders: 9%
Klobuchar: 8%

oh boy.... First of all Warren is a snake, I'll just start with that and all you have to do is look at her record vs her rhetoric. On top of that she's being propped up by the media. Polls aren't very accurate either as they don't account for the boots on the ground. They oversample old folks and undersample young voters. Here are some small truths

Biden is over represented in the Polls. He's probably the front runner, but also he's probably tied with Bernie.
Bernie is under represented in the Polls. Young people don't get polled he's by far the most popular with them, he's above the rest besides Biden.
Tulsi and Yang are also Under represented. Don't be fooled, they get crowds and they have an overlap niche with young people. Especially Tulsi since she also has the election integrity vote. The vote that bernie is losing by not calling out the corruption.

So, in other words, you've got nothing?

It's a fair question. I saw a break down of it once that actually spelled out all the math, but I'm having trouble tracking it down. From what I remember, the different policies are payed for as follows:

1. Expanding Social Security is done by removing the cap at which we tax for it. Currently, not all income is taxed for Social Security. We don't tax passive income, and we don't tax earned income above...*googles the number* $132,900 as of 2019. So if we remove that cap, and tax passive income, and expand Social Security accordingly, you can actually give the retired population a real living income and instead of needing to raise the retirement age, you can keep it where it is, and still have enough money for social security for another half a century, instead of the decade and a half we have left right now before the surplus runs out.

2. Medicare for all has a variety of factors that pay for it, I don't remember them all, but in general, the easiest way to understand it is that old people, the most expensive population, are already paid for by Medicare, and poor people, who can't pay into the system, are already paid for by Medicaid, the funding of which would get rolled into Medicare For All. Expanding it to include everyone then means that, if you look at your paycheck, and see how much is taken out for Medicaid and Medicare, combine those amounts because they're one program now, and increase that by a few percent of your income, you get what you'd need to pay into Medicare For All. Right now, that rate is, by my googlings, 1.45% for Medicaid and 1.45% for Medicare, so 2.9% total, double if you're self-employed. The quote I saw from the campaign said to raise the rest of the funds would require an additional 4%. Considering we currently spend 18% of GDP on healthcare in this country, having every possible healthcare expense paid for with just 10% seems like a pretty good savings to me. Remember, his M4A plan includes dental, vision, and hearing, and your premiums, deductibles, and co-pays all go to $0, so while you do pay a bit more in taxes, this is far more than offset by those costs going to $0. You actually save money. If you make more than say, $200k a year, you might not save money, because at a certain point that 4% increase, being 4% of a very large income, would be more than the average healthcare expenditures for the average American.

Now if you're wondering why that 8% of GDP spent on healthcare just magically disappears, there are multiple reasons for that. (Yes I know GDP and income aren't comparable % to % like that, but it's close enough and easier to explain this way) First, you know how everyone says that government is wasteful because of the bureaucracy? Well it's true, objectively, but you know what's even more wasteful? More bureaucracy. And more bureaucracy is exactly what you get when every hospital needs to devote whole floors, wings, or even building of their hospital campus to office space to process insurance claims. Not to mention all the bureaucracy of dozens and dozens of insurance companies with tons of offices across the country. That all goes away with Bernie's M4A, because he gets rid of private insurance, and the plan covers EVERYTHING, so all those now obsolete offices close down, all those upkeep costs go to zero, the labor costs go to zero, and the hospitals can convert those floors/wings/buildings from office space to actual medical floors. (It's free real estate).

And they're going to need that free real estate, because the second major way that M4A eliminates costs is with bargaining. Essentially with all the competitor insurance out of the way, M4A becomes like a monopoly, but in reverse. While a monopoly is one seller, many buyers, M4A is a monopsony, the reverse, with one buyer, many sellers. This is where the phrase "single-payer healthcare" comes in. The government isn't making a profit off this, it has no shareholders or CEOs to pay, so it's only motive is to reduce how much it pays for services, to bargain on behalf of the American people for better healthcare prices, like a giant union made of the entire 300 million+ population of the USA. That's a lot of power, and with no one else to go to, the hospitals, the drug companies, etc. have to meet the demands of the M4A program, because that's their only source of income now. The program just needs to not be so demanding as to put companies out of business, which other countries with similar programs have managed fine so I'm not worried about that. And before you say that all those closed offices will mean lost jobs, just remember that it'll also mean more medical wings opening, so therefore more jobs in healthcare, which pays way better and is way more meaningful than some dumb office job as a paper pusher.

3. Okay, that was a doozy, but you did ask for it. Education is simpler though. College is way cheaper than healthcare, as expensive as college is. Tuition is about $70 billion dollars a year right now, chump change compared to Medicare For All. Also, if you're not aware, his plan doesn't have the federal government pay for all of that either. It only covers 67%, with the states taking the rest. To prevent ballooning costs, it requires all states to pay that 33%, so they have incentive to keep it low, and don't just raise tuition to take more from the federal government. Also, none of the 67% is allowed to go to administrator salaries, so you don't just have the president of the college pocketing an increasing amount of the money every time they think they want a raise. How is it paid for? Bernie calls it a Wall Street speculation tax, but it's a tax on stock trades. With just a 0.5% tax on stock trades, just 50 cents tax on every $100 of stock, plus a 0.1% tax on bond trades, and a 0.005% tax on derivative trades, the Sanders campaign claims the government could raise $2.4 trillion dollars over 10 years. Do the math, 67% of 70 is 47, so $47 billion dollars over 10 years is just $470 billion dollars. What's all that extra money for? Cancelling all student debt. There's $1.6 trillion dollars of student debt right now, and $2.4 trillion-$0.5 trillion-$1.6 trillion is...still $300 billion dollars of padding in case stock trades slow even more than anticipated, and if they don't, then that's $300 trillion dollars off the deficit.

That's enough for now, I have to get back to work. Hope that answers some of your question.

While I tend to agree with your politics, although I don't see Warren as a snake or fake, just a little less revolutionary than Bernie, I think you dig yourself into a big wrongness hole with your stance on polling.

1. Polls doesn't do landlines alone anymore, as in the past. Landlines may reach mainly older voters, true, but modern pollsters also cover mobile phones or are conducted online. Which reaches different demographics.

2. Pollsters correct for demographics. Pollsters are aware if their sample misrepresents certain key demographics. And they correct for it - either mathematically or via interviews. If they have filled their quota on certain demographics, they skip them if they get more of these demographics and instead focus on interviews with people from demograohics which are underrepresented currently in their sample.

3. While younger voters may be underrepresented in many polls compared to their fraction of the whole electorate, there is certainly a trend (in most western countries actually) for lower turnout in younger demographics. Actually there are many differences in turnout for different demographic groups, but let's lok at ages (this graph is for presidential elections):

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2017/05/voting_in_america.html

As you can see the older demographics have high turnout and the youngest demographic has actually the lowest turnout. That said, if someone can activates demographics that usually don't vote, that usually leads to the most interesting results. But it is a hard thing to pull off.

---------

This all means that certainly the polls are no surefire way to predict the primaries, but they are better than you give them credit for. Especially you can't just assume a big systematic error that is consistent over time and different pollsters. That just isn't happening. If you lie to yourself this way, you set yourself up for disappointment.

oh boy.... First of all Warren is a snake, I'll just start with that and all you have to do is look at her record vs her rhetoric. On top of that she's being propped up by the media. Polls aren't very accurate either as they don't account for the boots on the ground. They oversample old folks and undersample young voters. Here are some small truths

Biden is over represented in the Polls. He's probably the front runner, but also he's probably tied with Bernie.
Bernie is under represented in the Polls. Young people don't get polled he's by far the most popular with them, he's above the rest besides Biden.
Tulsi and Yang are also Under represented. Don't be fooled, they get crowds and they have an overlap niche with young people. Especially Tulsi since she also has the election integrity vote. The vote that bernie is losing by not calling out the corruption.

Warren's rise is pretty easy to explain you just have to look back at Kamala. She's the current and probably the last media darling. She's the establishment's pick whether you want to hear it or not, she is. She's getting the media boost which is also a good amount of the people who are being polled. Most of them watch corporate media and they see her and she seems to be doing well so they think about going to her. She's also picking up the anti-sanders Hillary crowd, I'd prefer to describe them in another way but I don't feel like getting banned. point is her polls are most likely inflated as well.

You want an actual good metric of how well candidates are doing?
Individual donors and Volunteers on the ground.
Bernie has 1 Million Volunteers and the most individual donors. These are essentially votes.
Warren is 2nd though she's done that by stealing bernie's ideas and passing them off as her own. And then she waters them down to the point where they aren't worth it.

Let me say this one more time. All of Warren's "plans" (except green bombs cause lol, she's a warmonger) are stolen from bernie and have bills written by Bernie himself that she never cosponsored. She's using his talking points, his ideas and then I hear people saying she's more progressive.... like LOL NO. She's 100% fraud and you want to know why?

She takes big Money. She bundled 10mil from her senate re-election from big donors and is using that to run "grassroots" in the Primary. Then in the general back to that big money. She said it herself. Check open secrets. Look at her record. Look at her donors. She's not your friend, She's Not Progressive but she most definitely, is 100% Neoliberal.

Also check this twitter thread:

Bernie makes it clear that he's not here to call out Elizabeth Warren's hypocrisy. That's fine. I'll do it for him.

Here's a thread about the times @ewarren has had to backpedal:

— Ronnigasm (@LoveFromRonni) September 10, 2019

and also an article to help: https://medium.com/@jemtoback/the-legitimization-machine-elizabeth-warren-3d38a232e6eb

"Enthusiasm".
Ha. Tell that to the swing voters that gave Dems the House. This kind of delusion makes Biden's lead with a broad and diverse group of voters all the sweeter.

Bernie is very overrepresented in Twitter circles, but he has a substantial following at least.
That said, "young voters" are not gravitating towards lunatic war-criminal-apologist bigot Gabbard. You can only get that impression if you get your "facts" from the most narrow, extremist, fringes. Doesn't she have to go do another interview at Fox News anyway?

No. Let's review.

1) I said that "many" Bernie Sanders supporters now actually prefer Biden over Warren. That is not a 'generalization', it's a statement of demonstrable fact. There is a difference. The survey data you yourself provided suggests it to be between one-third and one-fourth of Sanders supporters who currently feel that way.

2) According to the very survey you yourself pointed me to, the second choice candidates of Bernie Sanders supporters are:

Biden: 29%
Warren: 28%

In other words, Biden is actually the second choice of more Bernie Sanders voters than Warren is, according to this survey, which suggests that your bolded statement is incorrect.

For comparison's sake, the same poll finds that second choice candidates of Elizabeth Warren voters to be...

Sanders: 23%
Biden: 22%

There is a notable difference between 29% and 22%. It's not epic, but it is something. It's also just one poll, but that one poll is the one you pointed to and it does kind of bear out my point. I feel that it's a reflection though of the disproportionate belligerence we have seen from the Sanders camp toward Warren in recent weeks since she held that 15,000-strong rally in Seattle, which is when this fissure began by no coincidence.