In September, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) led the Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa poll for the Democratic primary. Today she has fallen to a distant second place, in a statistical tie with former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
In the previous poll, Warren led the Democratic primary field with 22% of respondents selecting her as their first choice. In the most recent poll, released over the weekend, shows Warren’s support has dropped – now just 16% say she is their first choice for the Democratic nomination. This puts her in a statistical tie for second place with Biden and Sanders, who each received 15% support in the poll. South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg has pulled away from his competition to claim first place in the latest poll, with 25% of respondents saying he was their first choice for the nomination. This was a 16-point leap for the Midwestern mayor since the previous poll.
The biggest change for Warren since the release of the September poll was the unveiling of her plan to fund her Medicare-for-All proposal. The latest Iowa poll found this was at least part of the reason for Warren’s slide. This was the first time her numbers slipped in the Iowa poll, and respondents’ opinions of her ideology has changed a bit. In March, 54% said her political views were “about right.” Now 48% say the same. Also in March, just 23% said she was “too liberal,” but today 38% say the same. As the Des Moines Register noted, however, she’s still seen as more moderate than Sanders, who first championed the Medicare-for-All idea.
The Register spoke to 22-year-old Andrew Couch, who said he preferred Buttigieg’s “Medicare for All Who Want It” plan instead of the Sanders-Warren approach.
“I’m not really that big a fan of Medicare for All, just because I don’t think it’s really a realistic thing that can be passed in Congress,” Couch told the outlet. “And also I think people should have an option for their health insurance, instead of being forced to join a government-ran health insurance company.”
Perhaps Couch is an outlier among Iowa Democratic youth, or perhaps not. That could be an issue for Warren going forward.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, Warren’s plan to fund her Medicare-for-All proposal relies on fantasy estimations and assumptions. Unlike Sanders, Warren claims she can raise $52 trillion over the next 10 years without raising taxes on the middle class. She says she can accomplish this by cutting military funding and taxing the wealthy. She also claims immigration reform would help raise the money, even though such reform has been impossible to get through Congress in the current and previous two administrations.
Her plan also vastly overestimates the amount that would be collected from proper tax collection. A Congressional Budget Office estimate said the IRS would raise $55 billion over 10 years if the government spent an additional $20 billion on better tax enforcement, for a net revenue take of $35 billion. Warren claims she can raise $2.3 trillion with better tax enforcement.
Warren also proposed a number of revenue raisers that would be passed on to the middle class, such as payment cuts to doctors and increased taxes on employers.