An obvious counterpoint to Nate’s “Biden is the voice of America” is that many elements of Bernie and Warrens platforms poll really well when divorced from the candidate.
Yet, even that is not really sufficient to explain anything. I think that Nate has a good grasp of the statistics, but has never written a survey and never worked as any kind of market researcher. So anybody that’s ever worked professionally in market research will tell you that you can get irrational results all the damn time, even in carefully constructed surveys.
When somebody says “Biden’s policies align most closely with my own”, that doesn’t mean they are evaluating him exactly along those metrics, but are comparing him with their idea of what Biden’s policies are. 1) who knows how accurate that is 2) it probably varies a lot from candidate to candidate because some talk policy a lot and some platitudes 3) it’s probably more of a popularity contest than a true reading of their policy platform.
It doesn’t make sense to me that Biden is the candidate for the average Democrat, because there is no room to his right in the party. So who’s he in the center of? Bernie and Steve Bullock? Well why is Bullock polling at 0% then?
