By Nate Silver @ FiveThirtyEight.com, Aug. 26

If you’ve been following our coverage of the Democratic primary, you’ll know that I don’t think much of media really understands Joe Biden’s popularity among Democrats. That doesn’t mean that Biden is destined to win the primary. In fact, I’d regard him as an underdog relative to the field — that is, I think he has a less than 50 percent chance of getting the nomination — partly for reasons I’ll outline later on in this column. But there have already been several occasions when despite widespread predictions of Biden’s demise, the former vice president rebounded or held steady in the polls.

Furthermore — not totally unlike Donald Trump four years ago — Biden’s support comes mostly from the type of Democrats who are sometimes relatively invisible in media coverage of the campaigns, such as black Democrats and older Democrats without college degrees. That’s another reason to be skeptical about claims that Biden isn’t as popular as polls seem to imply. They sometimes reflect narratives that are filtered through journalists’ college-educated social environments — or conditioned by conversations on social media — with all the implicit biases those can introduce.

So this article about Biden in The New York Times, which alleged a disconnect between the polls and conditions on the ground In Iowa, was a little dismaying for me. Here’s a representative snippet [....]