There is a full year before Election Day, and a lot can change. Ms. Warren is an energetic campaigner. She could moderate her image or energize young and nonwhite voters, including the millions who might not yet even be included in a poll of today’s registered voters. Mr. Biden could lose the relatively conservative voters who currently back him; the president could be dealt irreparable political damage during the impeachment process.
This is an important section.
The major demographic cleavages of the 2016 election also remain intact. Mr. Trump struggles badly among college-educated white voters and nonwhite voters, though there are signs his standing among the latter group has improved modestly since the last presidential election. He counters with a wide lead among white voters who did not graduate from a four-year college.
The poll offers little evidence that any Democrat, including Mr. Biden, has made substantial progress toward winning back the white working-class voters who defected to the president in 2016, at least so far. All the leading Democratic candidates trail in the precincts or counties that voted for Barack Obama and then flipped to Mr. Trump.
As a result, Democrats appear to have made little progress in reclaiming their traditional advantage in the Northern battleground states, despite their sweep there in the 2018 midterms. Respondents in these states said they voted for Democratic congressional candidates by an average of six points, all but identical to their actual winning margins.
I agree with you here. 2018 made it clear that most of the Obama-Trump white-working class voters are gone for the Democrats, permanently. Democratic wins in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania last year (and yes, Sherrod Brown's win in Ohio too), as well as in Illinois, New York, Maine, etc., were fueled by college-educated white voters in the urban areas and suburbs, by younger voters, and by nonwhite voters.
Bob Casey, who once used to do extremely well in the traditionally Democratic working-class and rural areas of Southern and Central Pennsylvania, lost those regions decisively last year, yet demolished Barletta in the Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Harrisburg metropolitan areas. And both Gretchen Whitmer and Debbie Stabenow in Michigan relied upon traditionally Republican suburban counties like Kent and Oakland for their victories. Biden's leads in the polls, as we've seen thus far, are deriving from exactly these same kinds of sources. Even "ol' Scranton Joe" is going to do much worse than Obama in the white working-class and rural areas next year, if he is the nominee.
