Elizabeth Warren has dropped to fourth place nationally, now polling behind Michael Bloomberg, and her fifth-place challenger Pete Buttigieg is quickly closing in. She placed third in Iowa and dropped to fourth in New Hampshire, where she won no delegates. She also placed fourth behind Joe Biden in the latest quarterly fundraising totals. Moving forward, Warren is likely to struggle as the primaries leave her home turf of New England and her whiter base; Nevada, where some polls place her in second (while running nearly 20 points behind Bernie Sanders) may very well be her last significant showing in the primaries, at least until the voting returns to Massachusetts.
Warren, in other words, is in the mid-to-late stages of what would ordinarily be regarded as a dying campaign - and she is being covered in the press accordingly. She isn't the frontrunner (Sanders), and she isn't the long-prohibitive frontrunner whose campaign may or may not be imploding (Biden). She isn't the billionaire who sat the first few states out but is waiting in later states as a formidable roadblock (Bloomberg), and she isn't the precocious insurgent who dumped all of his money into the first two states and nearly stole both of them (Buttigieg). Warren's current narrative is "mid-tier candidate gradually declining in the polls and losing any plausible path to victory."
The reality check is worth spelling out since, particularly over the past week, Warren supporters have begun loudly insisting that their candidate is being "erased" by the media.
In part, I think this is because they've lost perspective on what normal coverage is like. Warren rode a tidal wave of relentlessly fawning coverage well into early October, and her supporters became accustomed to 24/7 hype in the media.
But a lot of this complaining about press coverage is also an aggressive and fairly transparent attempt to work the refs. Warren desperately needs a comeback narrative to save her faltering campaign, so she is pressuring reporters to focus on any positive spin they can find. The bar has been set extremely low for her at this point, so if she outperforms expectations in Nevada - even without, you know, actually winning - the Warren campaign will actively promote this as the first stage of a grand shift in momentum that ends in some kind of majoritarian (or at least brokered) win at the convention. And reporters may very well be guilt-tripped into playing along.