Bernie Sanders Slumps, Elizabeth Warren Surges Past Him In New Poll, But Joe Biden Holds Commanding Early Lead
A new Quinnipiac University poll brought bad news for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who in most previous polls had placed second in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination behind former United States Vice President Joe Biden. The 76-year-old Biden finally entered the race last week after months of anticipation that he would declare his candidacy.
But in the new poll, Sanders has slumped into third place, behind surging Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has based her campaign around the slogan, “Warren’s got a plan for that,” as The Washington Post reported, backed up by a flurry of detailed policy proposals on issues ranging from tuition-free college, to corporate taxation, breaking up big tech companies, combatting political corruption and numerous others.
The Quinnipiac poll, however, shows Biden with a larger lead than in any previous recent Democratic primary poll, as FiveThirtyEight.com documented. In the poll, Biden’s 38 percent support leads Warren’s 12 percent by 26 points, with Sanders next at 27 points behind the Barack Obama administration vice president.
A CNN poll released on Monday, however, showed somewhat different results, with Biden still holding a commanding lead at 39 percent, 24 points ahead of Sanders at 15 percent with Warren another sect points back in third place at eight percent.
The new Quinnipiac results did little to change the overall average of all polls calculated by Real Clear Politics, which has Biden at 32.8 percent, Sanders at 19.4, with Warren and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg tied in third place with 8.4 percent.
But as the Inquisitr reported last week, with the opening of primary season still nine months away, the race could remain wide open, with one poll that asked an open-ended candidate preference question of respondents — that is, without listing the names of specific candidates — finding that a full 54 percent of Democratic and Democratic “leaning” voters saying they still had no idea for whom they would vote in the 2020 race.
If that poll, conducted by The Washington Post/ABC News, is accurate, all of the 20 so-far declared candidates in the Democratic field still have plenty of available supporters they could, in theory, attract over the next several months, changing the entire outlook of the race.
The Quinnipiac poll also asked voters’ views on the relative electability of the various candidates, with Biden emerging as an even bigger winner in that category as 56 percent said that Biden has the best chance of any Democrat to defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. That put him well ahead of Sanders, who came in second with only 12 percent believing that the 77-year-old self-styled “Democratic Socialist” could defeat Trump in the November 2020 general election.
