So what explains Bernie's slow drip of eroding support and increasing disapproval numbers?
His approval/disapproval numbers were always bad. Since the start of primary polling post-November '18 he's only been positive with democrats. He consistently loses independents. To figure out what happened with his support, you have to look at his crosstabs. You would expect some level of attrition going from a 1v1 to a multi-way race. But it hasn't been consistent between racial subgroups and the nature of the pattern reveals the problem. Bernie went from winning half of white voters, a quarter of black ones, and I think got slightly more than half of Hispanic ones, to consistently polling in the 15-20% range with all 3.
And so to figure out what's going on, you have to look at who made up his base last time. It was young people, socially conservative D/I voters, and far left ideological types. Bernie lost over half his previous white and Hispanic support while only losing a quarter of his black support. And Bernie still polls best with 18-34s. That strongly suggests that the core of his big decline is losing the socially conservative votes now that there are candidates more attractive than him on that axis, whereas before he benefitted strongly from being not-Hillary. A coalition of young and/or lefty types lines up with his campaign now generally performing equally well among all racial groups, but at a far worse electoral position.
The eroding support in the last month or so is probably just Warren defections, since if you're in it for the policy but don't care about socialism/capitalism specifics, you could easily flip/flop between them.
??? HOW IS GILLIBRAND DOING SO POORLY???
I mean it's pretty funny but also very confusing. I don't even know who Ryan and Messam even are and yet...
Running a NY State campaign on a national level. She and Beto made the same error.