Elizabeth Warren Crushes Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden in Progressive Straw Poll by More Than Double

Massachusetts Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is getting a lot of attention from a progressive straw poll that shows her crushing both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden by more than double.

MoveOn.org’s latest poll of its members shows Warren as the first choice of 37.8 percent of the progressive group’s membership, with Sanders at 16.5 percent and Biden, who consistently leads national polls by a wide margin, at just 14.9 percent.

As NBC News points out, this result marks a huge increase in support for Warren since MoveOn’s December straw poll, when just 6.4 percent listed her as their first choice. The new result also gives Warren a boost going into the first Democratic debates Wednesday and Thursday.

There are a few things to keep in mind, however, before people begin sticking forks in Biden, Sanders, or the rest of the 2020 non-Warren field. The first is that Biden and Sanders still enjoy the greatest leads, by far, over President Donald Trump in head-to-head polling, and both candidates did manage to gain in the MoveOn poll, if slightly.

The second thing to keep in mind is that while MoveOn is a good barometer of one group of progressive voters, the candidate they overwhelmingly voted to endorse in 2016 did not end up winning the nomination.

And finally, even within progressivism, the organization is extremely pro-Warren. In 2015, before Bernie Sanders’ candidacy took off, MoveOn mounted an aggressive campaign to draft Elizabeth Warren for a presidential run. So while this straw poll is undoubtedly good news for Warren, it isn’t necessarily a disaster for Sanders, or anyone else.