Giovanni Russonello

With the candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden cooling off, the race now looks more interesting than at any point since campaigning in Iowa began intensifying over the summer. Here are a few major takeaways from the poll.

If three’s a crowd, what’s one more?

The Iowa poll demonstrated that Warren has strength in Iowa, and room to grow — but she has not quite broken out of the pack. All four of the top candidates — Warren, Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg — are technically locked in a statistical tie, according to the poll’s 4.7-point margin of error.

Then there’s the fact that 65% of Iowa voters who named a first-choice candidate said they could still be persuaded to caucus for someone else. While Warren is at the top of the crowded bunch with 23% of the overall vote, only about a quarter of her supporters are certain they’ll caucus for her on Feb. 3.

That said, there is evidence to suggest that her support is solidifying. Warren is the second-choice pick of 25% of voters with a chosen candidate — that’s 10 points higher than Sanders, the runner-up. And she leads among the two-thirds of voters who say they’re paying very close attention to the news; she has 23% support from that group, compared with Sanders’ 16%. As the caucuses near and attention picks up, she may have a particularly good shot at winning over voters who are just tuning in.

Biden’s name recognition goes far

With Biden’s campaign faltering slightly, there are signs hidden within these poll results that he is still relying heavily on name recognition, rather than enthusiasm.

He is buoyed by the sense — held by 4 in 5 Democratic voters — that he would have a good chance of beating President Donald Trump in the general election. Slim majorities of Democratic voters say they would prefer a moderate candidate and one who promises to find common ground, rather than a trenchant liberal.

But Buttigieg also polls formidably among these middle-path voters, and he is fast on Biden’s heels. They are roughly tied for the lead among voters looking for a candidate who will seek common ground with political opponents.

Meanwhile, Biden doesn’t command even 10% among the liberal Iowa voters that make up the party’s core. Only 2% of voters underage 45 said they would support him. And he draws a good deal of his backing from those who say they have never attended a caucus before, possibly showing that his numbers are being pumped up by respondents who are less engaged — and perhaps, less likely to turn out.

Are Bernie’s backers backing away?

Sanders, who nearly won the Iowa caucuses four years ago, stands at 19% in the poll, revealing that he has held onto a durable — but diminished — following.

Warren has already swept up support among what was once his most solid demographic: young voters. According to the poll, Warren was the choice of a whopping 38% of voters under 30, compared with 29% for Sanders. But neither of them has been able to capture even one 1 of every 5 voters age 45 and over.

Warren seems to have annexed much of Sanders’ support among very liberal caucusgoers; she now has 37% of them in her corner, compared with 28% for him.

Warren’s supporters aren’t as progressive as she is

Not all of the Democratic voters who are gravitating toward Warren express passion for each element of her progressive agenda.

Two-thirds strongly back the idea of a public health care option, and a majority — 57% — also strongly support increasing Social Security benefits.

But there is less widespread enthusiasm for some of the boldest progressive proposals that Warren and Sanders have put forth. Just one-third of Democratic voters expressed strong support for giving free college tuition to all Americans, and only 43% of Americans strongly believe the big banks and tech companies should be broken up. Buttigieg’s and Biden’s backers tend not to be enthusiastic about those ideas.

Yet Warren has managed to assemble an ideologically diverse coalition. Though her supporters generally skew liberal, most of them don’t feel strongly about eliminating college tuition, and almost half don’t express strong support for breaking up banks and tech companies.

Health care has been the most discussed issue of the primary season, with Sanders and Warren advocating a “Medicare for All” bill and more moderate candidates calling for a public option. The poll found that most Democratic voters in Iowa are open to a single payer-type plan, but a majority would prefer a candidate who seeks to strengthen the Affordable Care Act and add a public option.

While Sanders’ Iowa supporters are united in their desire for a single-payer health care system, Warren brings together a broader spectrum: Barely over half of her voters feel strongly about getting rid of private insurance. This suggests that Warren has room to grow among the substantial share of voters who are less interested in Medicare for All, and who have not yet settled on a final candidate choice.

There’s still a lot we don’t know

It is impossible to say just how many voters will actually turn out in a primary, or which groups will vote in the greatest numbers. At caucuses, which are more sparsely attended, it’s especially hard to know.

So, remember that like all the preelection surveys that you’ll see in the coming months, the results of this one were dictated in part by how our team defined the probable electorate.

Add in the complex set of rules governing the Iowa caucuses — where backers of less-popular candidates will eventually have to throw their support to someone else on the night of the election — and it all adds up to a lot of uncertainty. This poll is nothing more than our attempt at a snapshot of where things stand, three months out.

Besides that, Iowa’s voters are more than 90% white, so the results of this poll carry only the faintest of implications about how the race will play out in the rest of the country. After Iowa’s caucuses and the first primary a week later, in heavily white New Hampshire, the importance of the party’s nonwhite electorate — particularly black and Hispanic voters — will come back into the foreground.

From late February through Super Tuesday on March 3, the focus will be on major contests in Southern and Western states.

This article originally appeared in

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is starting to stand out in Iowa, as Friday’s New York Times/Siena College poll shows. But she isn’t standing alone — at least not yet.

5 Takeaways From the Latest Iowa Poll

With former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren jockeying for the top spot in the Democratic presidential race, we decided to take a look at another candidate who’s been quietly climbing out of the lower rung: Pete Buttigieg. Are there signs that he could grow into a leading candidate, ultimately rivaling — maybe even beating — Biden and Warren?

The 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Buttigieg began his presidential campaign with a bang last winter and picked up a head of steam in the spring. But for the past several months he has been largely treading water among the second tier of candidates.

A recent batch of polling suggests that could soon change.

Positioning himself as a Midwestern realist who could unify voters across the aisle, Buttigieg has focused much of his campaign’s formidable war chest on Iowa. He has opened more campaign offices than any other candidate in that state, which is less than four hours west of South Bend on Route 80 and will host the Democrats’ first nominating contest in February 2020.

Buttigieg’s investment is paying off. A recent Suffolk University/USA Today poll of likely Iowa Democratic caucusgoers showed him alone in third place, at 13% support. That put him just a few points behind Biden, polling at 17.6%, and Warren at 16.8%.

The Real Clear Politics polling average in Iowa — which draws on polls of various methodologies and differing levels of credibility — puts Buttigieg in third place at 15.8%, just ahead of the 15.3% showing by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

“How much Buttigieg can grow is one of the most interesting questions in the race right now,” Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic consultant and founder of the centrist New Democrat Network, said in a phone interview.

If Buttigieg finishes strongly in the Iowa caucuses, Rosenberg added, he could make a play for the center lane of the Democratic electorate, establishing himself as a moderate alternative to Warren and a more youthful centrist pick than Biden, who is 76. “What’s important is that he’s demonstrated a capacity to do it already, by getting into clear double digits in Iowa,” Rosenberg said. “In a place that has to make up their mind first, he has been able to put himself in play.”

Buttigieg’s star also appears to be on the rise in another early-voting state, New Hampshire, where he consistently polls close to 10%, as well as nationwide.

A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday showed Buttigieg at 10% among registered Democratic voters across the country, staking sole claim to fourth place and breaking into double digits in a major national poll for the first time since the spring. About the same share of respondents — roughly one in 10 — identified him as the candidate with the best policy ideas, according to that survey.

In a national CNN poll released Wednesday, approximately a quarter of registered Democratic voters identified Buttigieg as one of the candidates they would like to learn more about, with only Warren garnering more interest at 31%.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has received a good deal of attention for taking on Warren in last week’s Democratic presidential debate and for advocating a tempered, consensus-based approach over a more liberal, idealistic one.

But there is evidence that voters were more impressed by Buttigieg, the other Midwesterner with a message of coalition-building and pragmatism.

“I’m running to be the president who can turn the page and unify a dangerously polarized country,” he said during the debate, before also confronting Warren on the tax increases that he said would be necessary to pay for “Medicare for All,” a single-payer system that would eliminate private insurance.

In Iowa, respondents to the Suffolk poll who had watched last week’s Democratic debate professed to having been impressed by Buttigieg. Thirty-nine percent of them said he had performed better than they had expected, higher than for any other candidate; 28% of caucusgoers said the same of Klobuchar. (That puts her technically within the margin of error of Buttigieg’s number, given the poll’s relatively small sample size.)

“He’s really winning the most with high-engagement Democratic primary voters, which also correlates to who goes to a caucus,” Sean McElwee, a co-founder of the left-wing think tank Data for Progress, said in a phone interview.

McElwee’s firm used its own data to assess differences in candidate support between voters who were paying close attention to political news and those who were not. The results suggest that Buttigieg’s appeal is twice as great among the most engaged observers.

“I think there’s absolutely growth potential with Pete,” McElwee said, adding that as voters begin to pay more attention in the months leading up to the first primaries and caucuses, Buttigieg will have a greater opportunity to make his case.

“He sort of creates an interesting coalition that can pull from a good chunk of different bases,” McElwee said. “You can pull in some of Biden’s white voters that are maybe more moderate; you can peel away some of the college-educated voters from Warren who are more liberal.”

And while he is the youngest candidate in the race, Buttigieg appears especially poised to appeal to older voters. Among likely caucusgoers over age 65 with a preferred candidate, 21% in the Suffolk poll identified him as their second choice. No other candidate scored as high as a second choice with that demographic — though, again, his number is technically within the margin of error of Warren’s 14% and Biden’s 11%.

Pete Buttigieg Is Running Strong in Iowa. Does He Have Room to Grow?

(Poll Watch)

Recent polls show that Democratic voters are most concerned about health care, gun control, climate change and immigration. Still, in poll after poll, they say decisively that nominating a candidate who can beat President Donald Trump in the general election is more important than finding one whose views align perfectly with their own.

With Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts running neck-and-neck with former Vice President Joe Biden, the stakes on Tuesday are higher than at any point in the race thus far. Here’s a glimpse at the issues and ideas that will be on many viewers’ minds as they watch the Democratic debate.

Trump and Impeachment

The House’s impeachment inquiry is underway, and Democrats broadly support removing Trump from office.

Roughly 9 in 10 Democratic voters said in a Quinnipiac poll released last week that they had been paying at least some attention to impeachment news, and nearly as many said that if a president asked a foreign leader to investigate a political rival — which Trump did — that is cause enough to be impeached and removed.

But the president may not be the only politician imperiled by the controversy. At Tuesday’s debate, that political rival, Biden, will be looking to assuage Democrats’ fears about his family’s role in the Ukraine story. By a margin of 50% to 32%, Democrats nationwide said in an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll this month that Biden’s chances of becoming the Democratic nominee were likely to be more hurt than helped by the fact that Trump had mentioned him in a phone call with the Ukrainian leader — even though Biden is not believed to have broken the law.

And ultimately, a candidate’s general election appeal is paramount to Democratic voters. By a wide margin — 61% to 37% — Democrats said in a separate NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll last month that they cared about finding a nominee who was likely to beat Trump more than they cared about nominating one who personally inspires them.

Health Care and Medicare for All

Disagreements over health care dominated the first three Democratic debates, and the issue is likely to play a prominent role in Tuesday’s.

The rising costs of health insurance and pharmaceutical drugs continue to worry voters. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll in September found that 7 in 10 Americans believed the federal government should make lowering prescription drug prices a top priority. And 64% considered lowering the overall cost of health care to be a top priority. Among Democrats, those numbers are even higher.

Yet Democratic candidates disagree on how to achieve these goals. Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont spent much of the first three debates arguing on behalf of Medicare for All, which would effectively replace private health insurance with a government-run system. Biden and other more moderate candidates have only endorsed a public option, which would allow Americans to choose between a government plan and private ones.

Last month’s Kaiser poll found that the general public was about evenly split on whether to support Medicare for All, but Democratic voters largely supported the idea. More than three-quarters of Democrats nationwide favored creating a national Medicare for All program, with 51% favoring it strongly, according to the poll.

But as is often the case, people’s responses depend on how the question is worded. In a Quinnipiac poll last month, when given a choice between keeping the private health care system and building on Obamacare, or replacing private insurance outright with Medicare for All, just 47% of Democratic voters chose Medicare for All, compared to 44% who preferred a more incremental approach. This suggests that candidates advocating a fully government-run system need to persuade more Democratic voters to unite around the idea.

Gun Control

All Democratic presidential candidates — and an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters — now support universal background checks for gun buyers. There are similar levels of support for banning all assault weapons.

But less consensus exists on what to do with the assault weapons that Americans already own: All the candidates support some kind of program in which the government would buy weapons back from gun owners, but none of the three leading Democrats — Biden, Warren or Sanders — support making that program mandatory. Seven in 10 Democratic voters support mandatory buybacks, according to an August Quinnipiac poll, although less than half of all voters do.

There is a similar lack of consensus among the Democratic candidates on whether to force all gun owners to register their weapons in a national database. Democratic politicians long dismissed the idea of a gun registry as a fearmongering tactic from the National Rifle Association, but it now enjoys broad support from the public: 62% of Americans back the idea, including 85% of Democrats.

Most candidates now favor establishing a registry, though some — including Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana — do not. Others, like Biden and Sanders, say it should apply only to owners of assault weapons.

Climate Change

Democratic voters widely believe that climate change represents an international emergency — 84% said so in the August Quinnipiac poll — and roughly 9 in 10 think the United States is not doing enough to address global warming.

All the major Democratic candidates have expressed support for the Green New Deal, though some have been more guarded than others. All five senators who will debate Tuesday night co-sponsored the bill. Buttigieg has simply called it “the right beginning,” while Biden’s campaign website endorses it as a “crucial framework.”

But the Green New Deal enjoys broad support from the American public, with 63% of respondents to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll in July saying they like the idea of investing government money to fund sustainable infrastructure projects and green jobs. Among Democrats, it’s a particularly winning concept; 86% of Democrats nationwide back the Green New Deal, the poll found.

Instituting a tax on carbon emissions enjoys less support from the public — just 50% of Americans like the idea, according to that poll — but 71% of Democrats support it.

Immigration

Even as Trump has made cracking down on immigration a central facet of his administration, Americans have generally become more accepting of immigrants. This year for the first time, a majority of Americans (55%) said in a Gallup poll that they believed immigration tends to help the U.S. economy, not hurt it. For Democrats, that’s especially true.

And a recent Pew study found that views of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the agency most directly associated with the president’s aggressive immigration policies, and which some immigration activists want abolished — have taken a negative turn. Fifty-four percent of all Americans now hold an unfavorable view of ICE, a 7-point jump from last year. And Democrats in particular feel this way: 77% of them expressed a negative view of ICE.

By a wide margin, Democrats believe immigration should be either kept at current levels or increased: According to Gallup, 41% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents want to encourage more immigration into the country, compared to just 13% who want it discouraged. That marks a 10-point leap since Trump’s election.

And it’s clear that Democrats worry about the vilification of immigrants — a central facet of Trump’s public identity. A full 82% of Democratic voters said they considered prejudice against immigrants a “very serious” problem in a recent Quinnipiac University poll.

As Debate Nears, Where Do Democratic Voters Stand on the Issues?

When they tune into Tuesday night’s CNN/New York Times Debate, what will Democratic voters be hoping to see? And what can opinion polls tell us about where the primary electorate stands on the issues?

After next week’s Democratic debate, pundits will inevitably argue over who won and who lost, and they’ll scour the polls to see if any presidential candidate has gotten a “bump” in support.

But as high-profile as they are, debates rarely help a candidate break out of a crowded field. And strategists generally agree that post-debate spikes in the polls seldom last for long.

A dozen candidates will be onstage at the CNN/New York Times debate Tuesday, but experts broadly agree that none of them are likely to see a significant change in fortunes in a single night.

Before the 2016 Republican primaries, Donald Trump’s publicity-heavy campaign rolled along with impregnable strength, despite the fact that TV viewers rarely gave him high marks for his debate performances.

The current Democratic race has been characterized by a similar steadiness, experts say, with former Vice President Joe Biden continuing to command the support of around a quarter of Democratic respondents, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts rising consistently and sometimes surpassing him.

“Democratic primary voters basically seem to be fine with their top three options,” said Sean McElwee, a co-founder of the polling and analytics firm Data for Progress, referring to Biden, Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

“There’s the possibility that a debate would drive a news cycle that would bolster a candidate,” McElwee added. “But instead, what we’ve seen is that those sorts of moments tend to fall off.”

Sen. Kamala Harris of California is the only Democratic candidate this cycle who has seen a statistically significant jolt in the polls after a debate. At the first round of Democratic debates in late June, she confronted Biden on his past opposition to federally mandated school busing. She immediately leapt up in the polls, enjoying double-digit support among primary voters nationwide throughout July.

Perhaps more important, the exchange gave her fundraising operation a shot of adrenaline: Just 24 hours after the debate, she had raised $2 million.

But she soon fell from the race’s top tier and has not broken into the double digits in any major national poll since the start of August.

McElwee cited recent studies showing that candidates’ success is strongly driven by the sheer amount of news coverage they manage to receive — an argument that was borne out by the success of Trump in the run-up to the 2016 primaries, when he was able to reverse the unfavorable opinions that most Republican voters held of him, not by changing the tenor of his campaign, but by securing almost nonstop coverage.

“There are lots of different earned-media opportunities in the current climate — and debates are very important,” McElwee said. “But if you look at the polling, there’s been lots of people who have had good debates, bad debates, and at the end of the day, it hasn’t really changed the broad structure of the race.”

“In the broad scope of cable news coverage, the one hit per month of the debate is not enough to make a candidate break through,” he added.

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said that debates can help drive future coverage, resulting in a snowball effect. But she added that candidates’ fortunes will largely be determined on the ground in early-voting states.

“I think that honestly, the debates are having more impact on news coverage than they are having impact on voters,” Lake said. “Candidates don’t get known by unveiling a good plan at the debate. They become known by immersing themselves in these early states.”

To qualify for November’s debate, candidates will need to reach 5% support in two polls in early nominating states, or 3% in four early-state or national polls. These are higher thresholds than for any debate thus far. A bump after next week’s debate could, at the very least, help candidates such as Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota or former Housing Secretary Julián Castro — who are now foundering in the low single digits — secure a spot onstage next month.

But historically, early debates have been more likely to disqualify a candidate than to provide a lasting jolt of momentum. In 2011, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas pledged in an early debate to eliminate three agencies from the executive branch if elected president but couldn’t remember the name of one of the agencies. He never recovered from the flub. (When Trump became president, however, Perry was chosen to head the Department of Energy, the very agency he had forgotten to name.)

Last election cycle, businesswoman Carly Fiorina enjoyed a strong showing in the second Republican primary debate, seeing a sizable uptick in support in the days afterward. But she could not convert it into a consistent climb in the polls.

“Successful first debate performances create buzz for a candidate, but also generate expectations for continued success,” historian and presidential scholar Bruce Buchanan wrote in an email. “If he or she does OK but less well in the second debate, the story is about underperformance.”

Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist and speechwriter, said Warren had found success by performing strongly in debates — while not chasing a breakout moment. “She has done this by performing consistently well by not looking for a cute line, and my guess is that she’ll continue that,” he said.

But Shrum noted that as the field of candidates narrows, and the remaining candidates each get more airtime, the opportunity for news-making moments will increase. “These early debates are more like skirmishes,” he said. “We’re now getting into the later debates — and they can have an impact.”

It may not be until the general election that the debate stage once again assumes prime importance.

“Primary debates are more like a beauty contest or a cameo appearance in a play,” Peter Hart, a longtime Democratic pollster, said. “It gives you a glimpse, it gives you an insight, and it allows a candidate to get noticed. More importantly, it can eliminate a candidate’s potential to be the nominee.”

On the other hand, he said, “general election debates have a huge impact upon the dynamics of the election — and the outcome.”

Democrats Will Hope for a 'Bump' at Next Week's Debate. What's It Worth?

As support for impeachment grows, the president’s base is digging in its heels. But he remains disliked and mistrusted by most of the country, suggesting that Democrats could find sufficiently broad support for impeachment without converting many Republican voters.

A majority of registered voters now approve of the House’s inquiry into impeaching the president, a poll released Monday by Quinnipiac University showed. A Monmouth University poll of all Americans released Tuesday, meanwhile, found that 49% support the inquiry — just shy of a majority, but still an 8-point jump from August.

Back-to-back Quinnipiac polls in late September — one conducted in the days leading up to Pelosi’s announcement last week, then another taken just afterward — showed that support for Trump’s ultimate removal from office jumped 10 points after the House opened its inquiry. This was driven by a surge among Democrats and a gentler uptick from independent voters.

Voters are now evenly divided on whether Trump should be removed, with 47% saying he should be and the same number saying he should not, according to the latest Quinnipiac survey. Last week 37% of voters said he should be, and 57% said he should not. (The Quinnipiac polls surveyed only registered voters; most other recent polls have included all American adults.)

Even as Democrats and independents become more supportive of impeachment, there are signs that Pelosi may have a hard time building nationwide consensus.

The share of Republican voters expressing strong approval for Trump’s job performance rose by 12 points since last week, from two-thirds to nearly 4 in 5, according to the Quinnipiac polls. And the share of Republican voters saying Trump is generally an “honest” person has spiked since March, when Quinnipiac last asked the question: from 66% then to 83%.

This suggests that the Republican base’s support for the president might be hardening as he comes under increasingly serious fire — even with evidence mounting that Trump pressured Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to investigate the son of a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

“The number of Republicans who say they approve strongly has risen since last week,” Mary Snow, a polling analyst at Quinnipiac, said in an interview. “So there is a real partisan divide to these questions.”

The percentage of voters saying they think the president “believes he is above the law” also remains stuck exactly where it was in early May: at 56%, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll. Just 15% of Republican voters hold that view of him.

Independents are split on whether the president should be impeached and removed, but they generally express support for the House’s inquiry. According to a CNN poll of all Americans taken after Pelosi’s announcement, support among independents for Trump’s eventual removal is now 11 points higher than it was in May. It stands at 46%, roughly even with the 45% of independents who say he should be allowed to remain in office.

That number appears poised to move in one direction or the other. When asked in a CBS News poll released Sunday whether it was too soon to say if Trump should be impeached over the Ukraine scandal, roughly a quarter of independents said it was.

In the Monmouth poll, respondents were asked how much they had heard about reports that Trump had asked Zelenskiy to investigate Biden’s son; 27% said they had heard only “a little,” and another 21% said they had heard nothing at all about it.

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, said that given the steadiness of Trump’s approval rating throughout his term in office, it seems unlikely to drop significantly during the inquiry. But that approval rating has generally remained at just over 40%, suggesting that a decisive majority could end up supporting impeachment anyway, Ayres said.

“The group to watch over the next few months is the 15 or so percent of the American electorate that disapproves of Donald Trump’s job performance, but until the Ukrainian news has opposed impeachment,” he said. “If that 15% that oppose Donald Trump moves to support impeachment, then you’ll have between 55 and 60% of the country supporting impeachment and removal from office. That becomes a significant development.”

Impeachment Polls Show a Steady Rise in Support

Support for removing President Donald Trump from office has leapt since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened an impeachment inquiry against him, but his Republican backers appear to represent an increasingly loyal minority, according to polls released this week.

As support for impeachment grows, the president’s base is digging in its heels. But he remains disliked and untrusted by most of the country, suggesting that Democrats could find sufficiently broad support for impeachment without converting many Republican voters.

Voters are now evenly divided on whether Trump should be removed, with 47% saying he should be and the same number saying he should not, according to the latest Quinnipiac survey. Last week 37% of voters said he should be, and 57% said he should not. (The Quinnipiac polls were of only registered voters; most other recent polls have included all American adults.)

“The number of Republicans who say they approve strongly has risen since last week,” said Mary Snow, a polling analyst at Quinnipiac. “So there is a real partisan divide to these questions.”

Independents are split on whether the president should be impeached and removed, but they generally express support for the House’s inquiry. According to a CNN poll of all Americans taken after Pelosi’s announcement, support for impeachment among independents for Trump’s eventual removal is now 11 points higher than it was in May. It stands at 46%, roughly even with the 45% of independents who say he should be allowed to remain in office.

In the Monmouth poll, respondents were asked how much they had heard about reports that Trump had asked Zelenskiy to investigate Biden’s son; 27% said they had only heard “a little,” and another 21% said they had heard nothing at all about it.

Whit Dickey, a Republican pollster, said that given the steadiness of Trump’s approval rating throughout his term in office, it seems unlikely to drop significantly during the inquiry. But that approval rating has remained at just over 40%, suggesting that a decisive majority could end up supporting impeachment anyway, Dickey said.

“The group to watch over the next few months is the 15 or so percent of the American electorate that disapproves of Donald Trump’s job performance, but until the Ukranian news has opposed impeachment,” he said. “If that 15% that oppose Donald Trump moves to support impeachment, then you’ll have between 55 and 60% of the country supporting impeachment and removal from office. That becomes a significant development.”

Support for Impeachment Is Rising, Polls Show

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Trumpeter Etienne Charles stood in a Michigan State University classroom on a recent Tuesday evening — about 2,000 miles north and 50 degrees Fahrenheit south of his native Trinidad — and spoke to the undergrad big band that he directs here. The horns were having trouble nailing the inflections on “Chega De Saudade,” the bossa nova standard, so Charles sang the lines out loud, vocalizing a kind of hand-drum pattern.

Then he told the horns to play back their parts, this time with the syncopation sharpened up. “Right now we’re a little too far on the straight side,” he said. Emphatic rhythm has always been the engine oil of a jazz big band, but Charles has original ways of addressing that history, inherited from his own homeland traditions.

His earliest instructors taught primarily by ear and built from the rhythm up. “Whatever songs we were singing in the choir — whether it was a Caribbean folk song, a chorale, a hymn — we would always learn the lyrics first and then say the lyrics in rhythm. And then after that they would teach us the notes,” he said over lunch at a restaurant near campus earlier that day. “We were always rhythmically on, as a result.”

Charles, 35, has been uniting Trinidadian methods with jazz ideas since he moved to the United States in 2002. He’s found that if you let them, they combine organically. Along the way, Charles has developed a magnetic sound on trumpet — clear and mellifluous, with a deep sense of economy, redolent of both Roy Hargrove and Chocolate Armenteros — and he’s becoming a composer to be reckoned with. Last year he became the newest member of the SFJAZZ Collective, contemporary jazz’s premier all-star band.

On Friday he released “Carnival: The Sound of a People, Vol. 1,” his most invigorating record yet. It grew out of trips home during Trinidad’s spring Carnival — an annual festival of parades and performances, with deep but still-vital roots in West African tradition. Its dances and songs peer back across centuries, into the years of black indentured servitude, slavery and, ultimately, freedom on the other side of the Atlantic.

In making “Carnival,” Charles brought a recording device along while he immersed himself in the festivities, then wrote a suite of original music. Unlike so much contemporary jazz that’s informed by global traditions, the album retains the atmosphere of restive jubilation that defines the actual event of Carnival. Charles’ band, featuring some of New York’s ace musicians, sometimes plays the pieces alone. Elsewhere, it accompanies field recordings of Carnival performers that Charles captured.

For drummer Obed Calvaire, who appears on “Carnival” and also plays in the SFJAZZ Collective, this presented a fruitful challenge. “What was special for me was to try to come up with a groove that fit inside their way of phrasing without interrupting,” he said. He found himself marveling at “some of the ways those percussionists phrase.”

Charles’ recent albums have all been studiously arranged and passionately played, but at times they feel dangerously tidy — as if his rigorous approach has sanded off the tension and weight of the original tradition he’s addressing. On “Carnival,” he gets past that. He’s drawn the rhythms from the source and left off the varnish.

“People ask me how I think about the difference between jazz and Caribbean music, but jazz is Caribbean music,” Charles said. “When I started writing the music for ‘Culture Shock,’ I thought that there was a difference and that there was actual integration or fusion going on,” he said, referring to his debut record from 2006. “By the time I got to ‘Creole Soul'” — from 2013 — “I had realized that the diaspora is just one.”

“Carnival” opens with a gargle of voices, a honked car horn, the clattering of biscuit pans. You’re hearing the performance group 2001 Jab Molassie playing on the street in Trinidad; they’re soon joined by a jazz septet playing an elastic and almost inebriated melody, folding its energy directly into the pan percussion. In footage captured for a future documentary film, you can see 2001 Jab Molassie’s members, some wearing devil’s horns, covered in blue paint and dancing fiercely in the street. They’re invoking the spirit of Jab Molassie, a mythical slave who was burned to death in a vat of molasses, and whose revenge-seeking spirit is called upon by the pan drumming.

On the next two tracks, “Dame Lorraine” and “Moko Jumbie,” the jazz group plays alone, exhibiting a lyrical swagger and tight comportment on pieces inspired by Carnival’s masquerading tradition. Throughout the album, Charles puts a lot of power in the hands of his percussionists — whether it’s Calvaire on drum kit or the bamboo and iron percussionists that play on the five-track “Black Echo” suite. He subtly revisits the island’s historical developments along the way: Black Trinidadians took up bamboo percussion for a time in the 19th century after the British banned iron instruments, which are believed to have sacred powers.

Charles was born in Trinidad in 1983, and his musical talent showed early. He entered into calypso competitions at Carnival before he was a teenager, making up songs in the old tradition, usually built around social or political commentary. “For calypsos, you want to have something that’s socially apropos,” he said. “You learn not just how to sing a calypso, but how to study and analyze events.”

He added: “What I didn’t know then was, it was teaching me how to write.”

He moved to Tallahassee in 2002 to study at Florida State University, where he was mentored by pianist Marcus Roberts. He hadn’t played much American jazz before enrolling, but he arrived bursting with talent and a professorial, inquisitive instinct. He was a good fit for the music. Somewhere along the line he discovered a 2000 album by Puerto Rican-born tenor saxophonist David Sánchez, “Melaza,” on which Sánchez unlooses homeland strategies and rhythms in a heady, contemporary-jazz context. “That record changed my life,” Charles said.

He moved to New York in 2006 (he still remembers the date: August 25) to attend Juilliard’s small, rigorous grad program, and after receiving his degree he spent about a year kicking around the city’s jazz scene. But he was hired to teach at Michigan State soon after and moved to a colder climate than he had ever thought he could tolerate.

In the decade he’s spent on the faculty, he has delved increasingly into research, partly thanks to the scores and field recordings available at Michigan State’s music library. In 2015 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, allowing him to take a few months off from teaching and return to Trinidad to research and write “Carnival.”

That was the most time he had spent back there since moving in 2002, but throughout his career he has maintained a connection to the island. He thinks of Trinidad less as a place from which to extract ideas and more as a homeland that he can, in turn, help enrich. A few years ago he noticed that live brass bands, which had been a central component at Carnival, were on the wane, so he got one together and started leading it in the processions every year. (When we spoke, he had only recently returned from this year’s celebration.)

And on any trip home, Charles said, he tries to teach workshops at schools, prisons and youth-correctional facilities. Based on his experiences there, he’s hoping to establish some way of helping incarcerated musicians find jobs upon their release — perhaps by encouraging hotels to hire more live musicians.

“Real, good music needs to get to the people,” he said. “A lot of what’s funneled through the media doesn’t teach people about their power or their freedom. It’s time for that to change.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/arts/music/etienne-charles-carnival.html" id="6bfd9aef-706d-3525-ac6d-4e70bf208c35">The New York Times</a>.

For Etienne Charles, Jazz and Caribbean Music Are One and the Same

(The New Vanguard)

His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by the composer Fred Onovwerosuoke, who studied with Nketia and became a close friend.

In a career stretching back to the 1950s and continuing into his 90s, Nketia wrote hundreds of articles and books in English and Twi, a Ghanaian language, on topics ranging from music theory to folklore, as well as scores of compositions. He held professorships at the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Pittsburgh; and the University of Ghana, where he helped shape the curriculum after Ghana broke free from British rule.

His 1974 book, “The Music of Africa,” is widely considered a definitive historical study, and “Ethnomusicology and African Music,” a collection of his writings published in 2005, is used in classrooms throughout Africa and across the world.

As a composer, Nketia wrote music for choirs, solo voices and instrumental groups that used both African and Western instruments. His music was particularly informed by the sounds of Ghana, but he integrated influences from across the African continent.

In his academic work, too, Nketia espoused a Pan-African ideology even as he insisted on the multiplicity of sub-Saharan cultures.

“The most important characteristic of this family of musical traditions is the diversity of expressions it accommodates, a diversity arising from different applications of common procedures and usages,” he wrote. “The music of Africa, like its language, is, so to speak, ‘ethnic-bound.’ Each society practices its own variant.”

Nketia devised ways of using Western techniques to document and analyze African music while preserving its indigenous characteristics. He revolutionized how the rhythms of sub-Saharan African music are transcribed, employing the 6/8 time signature rather than a simple two-beat measure. And his studies went beyond rhythmic analysis. He made a point of championing the diversity of harmonic languages used throughout Africa as well.

“He always wanted to ensure that the West knew about the diversity of our harmonic language,” Onovwerosuoke said.

Robert Farris Thompson, a professor emeritus of art history at Yale University, wrote in an email that Nketia was “one of the finest scholars in all of post-colonial Africa,” adding, “He showed that the African history of music was a sacred tradition revealed.”

Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia was born on June 22, 1921, in Asante Mampong, Ghana. In the Akan language, Kwabena is the name for boys born on Tuesday. An only child, he was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents after his father died. He credited his grandparents as his first music teachers.

He received training in European music theory as a high school student at the Presbyterian Training College in southeastern Ghana. In 1944, he was one of 20 Ghanaians in the first class awarded Britain’s Commonwealth scholarship, which sent him to England to study linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He also took classes at the Trinity College of Music and Birkbeck College at the University of London.

In 1952, back in Ghana, he accepted a research fellowship in African studies at what is now the University of Ghana and traveled the country recording musical performances and festivals. He began developing interdisciplinary programs at the university that explored the intersections of language, dance, music and folklore.

Nketia traveled to the United States for the first time in 1958, on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship; over the course of a year he studied at Juilliard, Columbia University and Northwestern University, and developed relationships with such prominent American musicians and folklorists as Charles Seeger and Henry Cowell.

Nketia performed “The Republic Suite,” perhaps his defining musical composition, at Ghana’s Republic Day Concert on July 1, 1960, celebrating the election of his friend Kwame Nkrumah as the nation’s first president. The suite’s formal elements aligned it with Western classical music, but many of its melodies were drawn from traditional songs recognizable to Ghanaian listeners.

Nketia became the deputy director of the University of Ghana’s new Institute of African Studies in 1961. Three years later, having attained tenure as a full professor, he became the first African to serve as the institute’s director. Soon after, he became the founding director of what is now the School of Performing Arts, and he filled its faculty and research positions with prominent Ghanaian artists, including the playwright Efua Sutherland, the author Ama Ata Aidoo and the choreographer Albert Mawere Opoku.

In 1992 he founded the International Center for African Music and Dance, an archive based at the university.

Nketia was the recipient of many awards and worked with a number of international cultural organizations, including UNESCO’s International Commission for a Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind.

Tireless in his scholarship, he delivered lectures at universities on five continents well into his later years and published his last book, “Reinstating Traditional Music in Contemporary Contexts,” in 2016, on the eve of his 95th birthday.

He is survived by three daughters, Akosua Adoma Perbi, Priscilla Naana Nketia and Adjoa Nketia; seven grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. His wife and their two sons, Kwabena Yeboa Nketia and Eric Kwame Gyimah Nketia, died before him.

Nketia’s grandson Kwame Ametepee Tsikata, a famed Ghanaian rapper known as M.anifest, remembered him as “very generous with all his knowledge and his wisdom.”

“He had an incredible intellectual curiosity,” Tsikata said, “until the end.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/obituaries/jh-kwabena-nketia-dead.html" id="c9ef5c61-90b0-3301-a829-1c1f3468967d">The New York Times</a>.

J.H. Kwabena Nketia, a Ghanaian ethnomusicologist and composer who became the world’s leading scholar on African musical traditions, died March 13 in Legon, a suburb of the Accra, the capital of Ghana. He was 97.

J.H. Kwabena Nketia, Pre-eminent Scholar of African Music, Dies at 97

Camae Ayewa leaned into her microphone closely and uttered evocative, devastating, prophetic poetry as video of a raging fireball was projected behind her.

The electronic soundscape coming from her laptop built to a series of shrill, greasy explosions, and Ayewa — who performs under the name Moor Mother — addressed the audience in a stern voice. “We want our realities back,” she seethed. “We want our futures back.”

Later, adopting a rap cadence, she chanted: “I just want to make it clear — revolution’s everywhere.”

This was 2017, at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and she was opening for the rock band A Place to Bury Strangers. Much of the audience seemed unready for the intensity of her set, but leaned in, berating the crowd — not performatively, not playfully, but dead-serious — demanding that people engage. In the end, they had no choice.

Last fall, at a small theater in Chicago, Ben LaMar Gay shook hand-percussion instruments; played long, low tones on the guembri (a North African stringed instrument); let loose a few simple, curling melodies on his cornet; and sang, unaccompanied, about losing his love, and about feeling lost himself. The singing morphed organically into a sensual chant, and he stamped his feet. The audience joined in, filling the room with a heaving rhythm. The sensation of many bodies singing and moving together lingered long after listeners left the theater.

Ayewa and Gay belong to a new generation of visionary black storytellers who are using words, music, electronics and mixed media to connect with a long tradition — one that calls into question the very nature of performance. Many of these young artists play various instruments, resisting the idea of technical mastery as an end goal, and see themselves as something other than entertainers. Reaching back through centuries of history, they are mapping strategies for the future, insisting on music as a collective endeavor.

Gay describes his work as a process of “dealing with folklore and history,” but also of forging ahead. “When you’re trying to find something, it is a search,” he said in an interview. “You’re thinking about the future already.”

He was raised in Chicago but found his musical voice while living in Brazil in the 2000s. “One important thing was when I was able to connect the samba man and the blues man,” he said.

Angel Bat Dawid — a young pianist, clarinetist and vocalist (among other things) whose debut album, “The Oracle,” garnered a flash of attention earlier this year — sometimes begins her performances at the back of the house, walking slowly through the crowd and singing an incantation as she pounds a drum. The practice stems from her years as an organizer of the Participatory Music Coalition, a group she founded in Chicago. Their sessions loosely resemble jazz jams, but with a more liberated, directly Afrocentric approach, drawing no line between trained performers and everyone else in the room.

“Participatory music, as opposed to performative music, is more African,” she said in an interview. “If you feel something, you can express it. You can participate.”

This type of liberated performance has a history that runs through the radical poets and performers of the 1960s and ’70s (Abbey Lincoln, Gil Scott-Heron and Nikki Giovanni among them), back to the early American stage tradition and the griots of West Africa. It owes a debt to avant-garde musicians in postwar Chicago, including the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Amina Claudine Myers. And it taps a literary tradition — including the work of Harriet Jacobs, Gwendolyn Brooks and Toni Morrison — that pulled from the traumas and triumphs of the black American experience to envision a more humane future.

Dawid was raised in the church but has since embraced a more nondenominational approach to spirituality. She refers to her music as “a ministry” — an idea that resonates with the words of the poet and critic Amiri Baraka, who argued that “any historical (or emotional) line of ascent in Black music leads us inevitably to religion, i.e. spirit worship.”

Melanie Charles first experienced live music as a vessel of spiritual communion, too. The Brooklyn performer still lives in her childhood home, where her Haitian grandmother hosted prayer meetings that sent songs of praise throughout the house. “They would sing these Haitian hymns, man,” Charles recalled in a recent interview at a Bushwick cafe. “Loud and out of tune, and so beautiful.”

Encouraged by her music-loving mother, Carles studied operatic vocals and jazz flute while attending D.J. shows on the weekends, finally landing on a hybrid identity. Today she is a singer, songwriter, electronic musician and budding video producer. Her first full-length recording, “The Girl with the Green Shoes,” from 2017, featured interpretive covers of jazz standards alongside woozy originals. Relying heavily on sampling and digital manipulations, the album stands adjacent to the popular, post-R&amp;B; sound of acts like SZA and Kelela, but it draws more explicitly on a long spectrum of history, and its message-driven poetry relies less on sex and romance in its search for meaning.

“You are exactly who you dreamed you would be / And exactly who the road will lead you to become,” she sings on “Mantra.”

Ayewa’s work often tells dark stories (“The idea is to time travel through the race riots,” she says in one forbidding lyric), but she sees it as part of a movement leading somewhere brighter and encouraging, too — away from old labels, and therefore, away from the past.

“The overwhelming thing about being an Afrofuturist is that I’m not saying, this is the end, we’re all doomed,” she said in a recent interview. “I say at every show: We’re not headed toward the doomsday. I believe there is another way. So it’s about trying to get the audience to understand another way of digesting the truth.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/arts/music/jazz-storytellers-moor-mother-melanie-charles.html" id="e8f501b0-9fd8-322f-a0ec-03984a4b5216">The New York Times</a>.

Visionary Musicians Seek Truths for the Future in a Spiritual Past

(Critic’s Notebook)

Leave it to Ibrahim — a master of understatement and balance — to make the impossible sound simple, and vice versa.

Sitting down for an interview at a nearby hotel earlier that day, a pastel scarf slung around his neck and a thicket of white hair tousled on his head, he had been similarly epigrammatic. He named the values underpinning his music: “ancient tradition, new elements.”

Ibrahim, 84, is cool and serious by nature; he smiles often, but only halfway. At Jazz Standard starting Thursday with Ekaya, his longtime septet, he’ll likely keep his interactions with the audience to a minimum, focusing intently on the keys instead, rummaging through a vast repertoire of original compositions, seeking perfection.

WASHINGTON — Receiving a Jazz Master accolade from the National Endowment for the Arts this spring at the Kennedy Center, Abdullah Ibrahim delivered his acceptance speech in under two minutes. The South African pianist thanked his mother and grandmother, then his fellow musicians and fans. All of them had fed his quest, he said, “to strive for perfection.”

Giovanni Russonello

Articles written by the author

5 Takeaways From the Latest Iowa Poll

Pete Buttigieg Is Running Strong in Iowa. Does He Have Room to Grow?

As Debate Nears, Where Do Democratic Voters Stand on the Issues?

Democrats Will Hope for a 'Bump' at Next Week's Debate. What's It Worth?

Impeachment Polls Show a Steady Rise in Support

Support for Impeachment Is Rising, Polls Show

For Etienne Charles, Jazz and Caribbean Music Are One and the Same

J.H. Kwabena Nketia, Pre-eminent Scholar of African Music, Dies at 97

Visionary Musicians Seek Truths for the Future in a Spiritual Past

Abdullah Ibrahim: A Lifetime of Dreams and Resistance at the Piano

Herbie Hancock Is Still Breaking Rules

Blue Note Records at 80: Can a Symbol of Jazz's Past Help Shape Its Future?

Blue Note Records at 80: A History in 15 Albums

Nat King Cole's Early Years Are Getting the Archival Treatment

Dorothy Masuka, South African Singer and Activist, Dies at 83

Ethel Ennis, Singer Who Walked Away From Fame, Is Dead at 86

Kiyoshi Koyama, Prominent Japanese Jazz Journalist, Dies at 82

Oliver Mtukudzi, Renowned Zimbabwean Musician, Is Dead at 66

Jazz at Lincoln Center to Program Its First International Festival

Clydie King, Top-Tier Backup Singer, Is Dead at 75