The Death of the Soccer Mom

This election update yesterday from FiveThirtyEight, "Our First Big National Poll Shows Just How Unsettled The Race Is," paints Bernie Sanders the front-runner nationally after Iowa:

[T]oday Quinnipiac University released a national survey conducted entirely after Iowa voted, and it found a new polling front-runner: Sen. Bernie Sanders, who led the field with 25 percent support.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, fell nine points since Quinnipiac last conducted a national survey in late January. This is the first time Sanders has led in a national Quinnipiac survey during the 2020 cycle. As you can see in our national polling average, the gap between Biden and Sanders is shrinking, too — they’re essentially tied at 22 percent.

Pete Buttigieg is a distant fifth in the latest Quinnipiac poll with 10%, five points behind Mike Bloomberg and four points behind Elizabeth Warren.

Unless Buttigieg can upset Bernie or come within four points or less of the Vermont senator, I imagine that he will quickly fade from relevance in the primary.

New Hampshire polls consistently show Bernie as the front-runner. I found Buttigieg's Friday debate performance poor. He got shellacked by the ABC questioner on his record of jailing black people for low-level drug offenses. His response to the criticism of kowtowing to billionaires was an absurdist plea for a rainbow coalition that included the plutocrats and kleptocrats who are destroying the nation and the planet. At this point Buttigieg's appeal is solely as an anti-Bernie, which, needless to say, is not a prescription for success in a splintered primary field.

I'm looking for a Bernie win of five-plus points. That should put former Mayor Pete in the rear-view mirror.

Today the The New York Times publishes a doleful pre-postmortem of the Warren campaign, "Elizabeth Warren Is Running Her Race. The Real One May Be Passing Her By."

I think what we're witnessing is a political paradigm shift in the United States. Trump's election four-years ago announced it, but, because of events like the Women's March and the 2018 Blue Wave, we didn't pay as much attention as we should have to the death of the ideal voter in the corporate political mainstream, the suburban soccer mom.

Warren's rapid demise means the soccer mom doesn't pack the wallop she once did. The other candidate heavily dependent on the soccer mom is Michael Bloomberg. If California is any indication, the soccer mom has gone missing there too, despite many millions spent to locate her.