Elizabeth Warren by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original

I’ve been a Warren skeptic for a while, but some of the latest polling out of Iowa is surprising. It’s also really bad news for the Massachusetts Senator.

As the current media darling, news networks and “fact-checkers” have not stopped heaping praise upon her since she started to see a rise in the national polling some months ago. She’s been labeled the presumptive front-runner for a while now. That all seems to be changing, though. After leading Iowa and New Hampshire in several surveys, Warren may not win either state now, leaving her no path to the nomination. The distant second she’s pulling in the national polling is largely irrelevant.

So who’s passing her up in the first state? Pete Buttigieg.

New Monmouth Iowa poll: Pete 22, Biden 19, Warren 18, Bernie 13, Klobuchar 5, Harris/Steyer/Yang 3

— Reid J. Epstein (@reidepstein) November 12, 2019

Buttigieg has done something smart the past month. Namely, he’s chosen to hit Warren head-on about things like Medicare for All and her “wealth tax.” For some inexplicable reason, the Democratic field laid off Warren for the better part of the campaign until recently. Whether it was fears of being called sexist and angering the woke base, those worries seem to be in the rearview mirror as both Buttigieg and Biden have come out swinging. Biden even hit her on her fake progressivism in a recent interview, pointing out that she was fairly moderate until she rose to national prominence more recently.

As many have speculated, Warren was always a paper tiger. She’s about as charismatic as my cat, and he sleeps 70% of the day. Her grating, whiny tone where she in-authentically attacks anyone who’s attained success is simply off-putting. It plays with a small subset of socialist-leaning Americans, but the majority simply want to attain success themselves.

The problem for Trump is that Warren was easily the most beatable of the major Democratic party candidates. You’d have liked to see her stick around long enough to gain the nomination. Now, her path is rapidly closing. If she can’t win Iowa or New Hampshire, she’s going to follow that up with getting blown out in the South and West. Where does she go from there? As Ted Cruz showed in 2016, if you can’t pull at least two of the early states and take the lion’s share on Super Tuesday, you’ll simply play catch-up the rest of the way.

With that said, Buttigieg shouldn’t be confused for a contender yet either. Winning Iowa is fairly meaningless because he’s getting crushed in the other early states. The Southbend mayor is more of a spoiler at this point, keeping Warren down while Biden takes New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. If he does that, he’s the nominee.

Warren washing out is the best thing that could happen for the Democrats’ chances, so Republicans should be hoping for a rebound here.

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