Recent polls have clearly indicated that Warren is going places. The RealClearPolitics national polling averages show her as basically tied with Bernie Sanders for second place with Joe Biden’s lead narrowing. The two most recent national polls (from Quinnipiac and Economist–You Gov) place her seven and five points, respectively, ahead of Sanders. Just as important, she’s gaining strength in the early states. A new Monmouth poll from Iowa places her ten points ahead of Bernie, and just nine points behind Biden, in a state where everyone concedes she has the best organization. In New Hampshire polls, where Biden’s early lead was less formidable, she’s nipping at Sanders’s heels. Warren is in a similar position in Nevada (which holds its caucuses 11 days after the New Hampshire primary), where Politico reported yesterday that she has already built a “monster” of an organization.

Warren is also clearly making gains in her implicit rivalry with her friend and ally Bernie Sanders for the affections of self-consciously progressive voters, even as she maintains some potential as a party-unifying figure that Bernie may lack thanks to leftover bad memories of his 2016 campaign. In that recent national Quinnipiac survey, she trounced Sanders among “very liberal” voters and actually led him among those under the age of 35.

Whether or not you think Sanders is losing strength (there’s evidence pointing in both directions on that proposition), it is clear that Warren is benefiting from the erosion in Kamala Harris’s support, which probably reflects both the dissipation of the buzz she commanded after the first round of debates and her widely panned performance in the second. Harris’s national polling average has dropped from 15 to 8 percent in the last month. And perhaps just as important, she’s showing little or no progress in taking away Joe Biden’s overpowering position among African-American voters, central to the Obama Redux strategy she is relying on. Quinnipiac gives her just one percent of the black vote nationally. A somewhat older Monmouth survey of South Carolina showed Harris with 12 percent of African-American support in what for her is a key state, where a majority of Democratic primary voters are black — but Joe Biden had 51 percent.

Put all that together with the inability of any candidates outside the Big Four of Biden, Warren, Sanders, and Harris to gain any momentum at all, and for the first time you can clearly see a plausible path to the nomination for Warren.