Joe Biden got some good news on Wednesday as two new polls were released showing him comfortably ahead in the 2020 Democratic race, confirming that a recently released Monmouth poll showing him collapsing and locked in a three-way tie had to be an outlier.
One of the Wednesday polls, by Quinnipiac, showed Biden at 32%, with a double-digit lead over his next closest competitor, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was at 19%. What’s more, the poll found him still commanding 46% among black voters, a crucial bloc in Democratic primaries. Biden also had very little competition among more moderate voters, where he garnered the support of 41% of the electorate, and still managed to lead among “somewhat” liberal voters. While Warren led among the “very liberal,” she faces more competition from Sanders among that group than Biden does in gaining the support of centrist Democrats.
All of this having been said, there’s another dynamic that should be worrisome for the Biden campaign. And that’s the hypothetical general election matchups in the same poll that suggest he’d beat Trump 54-38%, but also show:
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders topping Trump 53 – 39%;
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren ahead of Trump 52 – 40%;
California Sen. Kamala Harris beating Trump 51 – 40%;
South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg leading with 49% to Trump’s 40%.
As long as Democratic voters are griped with fear that Trump will be reelected and that Biden is their only sure bet of defeating him, he will coast to the nomination. But if more and more polls show Trump getting trounced by any Democratic candidate, suddenly many voters who might prefer other candidates no longer feel they have to settle for Biden. I mean in a world in which Sanders can poll 14 points ahead of Trump in a hypothetical matchup, the old assumptions about electability are turned on their heads.
As I previously recounted, I remember speaking to a Democratic voter ahead of the Iowa caucus in 2008, who explained to me that everybody knew that Democrats were going to win the presidential election that year, so they had the luxury of picking whichever candidate they liked best. This is one of the reasons Democrats ultimately felt secure in picking the untested freshman Sen. Barack Obama to be their nominee. If a similar sentiment prevails based on polling such as this, it will seriously weaken the case for Biden’s candidacy.
