Biden’s lead over Warren shrinks by half in new 2020 poll
October 30, 2019
Joe Biden outperformed Elizabeth Warren in a new survey of the 2020 Democratic contest — but the former vice president’s lead over the Massachusetts senator, who remains his closest competitor for the party’s nomination, has been cut in half since the summer.
Twenty-six percent of likely Democratic primary and caucus voters back Biden as their choice to challenge President Donald Trump in next year’s general election, according to a national USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll released on Wednesday, while 17 percent of respondents favor Warren.
Rounding out the poll’s top tier of Democratic candidates are Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, with 13 percent, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., with 10 percent. None of the party’s other White House contenders achieved double-digit support in the survey.
Biden’s dominance in public polling has diminished since August, when the previous Suffolk survey showed he was the favorite of 32 percent of likely Democratic voters and only 14 percent preferred the second-place Warren. Now, his edge has been slashed to 9 percentage points from 18.
The latest poll also moves Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who garnered 4 percent support, closer to qualifying for two debates. She needs to reach a 3 percent threshold in one more poll approved by the Democratic National Committee before Nov. 13 to participate in the upcoming forum in Atlanta on Nov. 20. If the congresswoman ultimately qualifies, she will become the 10th candidate set to appear on stage next month.
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Gabbard has halfway met the polling requirements for the Dec. 19 debate, hosted by POLITICO and PBS in Los Angeles, and needs to hit 4 percent in two additional DNC-approved polls by Dec. 12. She must also clear a donor threshold of 200,000 contributors for December, however. Her campaign did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether she had crossed the new donations mark; as of mid-September she had 172,000 donors.
So far, only four candidates — Biden, Buttigeig, Sanders and Warren — have qualified for the December debate. Harris is likely to join them, despite polling at only 3 percent in the Suffolk survey, needing just one more poll to qualify.
The USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll was conducted Oct. 23-26, surveying 399 likely Democratic voters. The margin of sampling error for that group is plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.
Source: https://www.politico.com/
