ELIZABETH WARREN DIDN'T FALL -- SHE WAS PUSHED

I'd like to report a murder.

Massachusetts Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s support has fallen off a cliff in the latest Quinnipiac University poll, as former Vice President Joe Biden has retaken the lead since last month and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg has leapfrogged into second place.

The latest poll, released Tuesday, shows Warren dropping from 28 percent in late October — which gave her a sizable lead over Biden and the rest of the field — to third place with just 14 percent....

A look inside the Q poll’s crosstabs show that Warren lost 14 points with black voters, and now polls at six percent with that group to Biden’s 43 percent. But Warren also lost 15 points with white voters, while Mayor Pete gained 10 points with whites.

This result caps off a bad month-and-a-half that has seen Warren’s national poll numbers steadily slipping.

It will be argued that Warren brought this on herself by releasing a detailed Medicare for All plan that immediately drew criticism. I'd say that her alternative was to not release that plan and be hounded by shrill cries of "WHERE'S WARREN'S PLAN? WHAT'S SHE HIDING?"

What really happened is that rich Democratic donors saw Warren's rise (and Biden's decline) and decided that it Would. Not. Stand. They're not going to pay significantly more in taxes! Who does Warren think she is? So they sent up the bat signal to the many, many elite-media journalists and pundits who are receptive to their views. As if by magic, every discussion of the Democratic race now turned on the question of whether persuadable centrist voters are so allergic to Medicare for All that they'll instantly flee into the arms of Donald Trump a second time. All the talk was about "electability" and about how scary middle-of-the-road voters find progressives to be. This (plus that one damn New York Times/Siena poll showing all the Democratic front-runners struggling against Trump) put the fear of God into much of the Democratic electorate. Like a high school girl rumored to have been involved in a baroque sex act, Warren was now seen by many as a pariah because they assumed other people saw her as a pariah.

Warren's campaign might not be dead. It might just be on life support -- she could cheat death again, as she did after she released her DNA results. Maybe this was just an attempted murder. But now we know that the Warren will have to beat one extra opponent in order to become president: the plutocratic wing of her own party. And they don't mess around.