Does the 2020 Democratic presidential primary officially have two front-runners?
Nate Silver thinks so after a new Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday shows Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pulling ahead of former Vice President Joe Biden. This is the first time Biden has lost his first place position since Quinnipiac in March began asking its question about candidate preference.
In the poll, Warren gets 27 percent support from Democratic voters, with Biden getting 25 percent support. For Warren, that's an eight point jump since Quinnipiac's August national poll, while for Biden, it's a seven point slip. Warren and Biden are now in a statistical tie.
Silver notes that while last week, he was thinking of the race as being Biden at "1a" and Warren at "1b," her latest polling has him already abandoning this distinction, and he's now ready to declare them "co-frontrunners." In addition to this Quinnipiac national poll, Warren also lead Biden in new polls this week in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Quinnipiac's polling analyst, Tim Malloy, came to a similar conclusion, saying, "We now have a race with two candidates at the top of the field, and they're leaving the rest of the pack behind." After Biden, there's a nine-point gap before Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is at 16 percent. No one else cracks 10 percent support.
Quinnipiac's poll was conducted by speaking to 561 registered Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters nationwide from Sept. 19-23. The margin of error is 4.9 percentage points. Read the full results at Quinnipiac.