Bernie Sanders is urging his supporters not to become complacent after a new poll finds him with a wide lead on the rest of the Democratic presidential pack a week out from the Iowa caucuses.
“We’ve got a long way to go. It’s going to be a tough fight and we can’t take anything for granted. Knock on doors. Make phone calls. Do everything you can,” Sanders, 78, tweeted.
We’ve got a long way to go. It’s going to be a tough fight and we can’t take anything for granted. Knock on doors. Make phone calls. Do everything you can. https://t.co/Xl1lQHiLog
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 25, 2020
The Vermont senator, who suffered a heart attack last year, is the No. 1 pick for the 2020 Democratic nomination for a quarter of likely caucusgoers, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released Saturday. That support marks a jump of 6 percentage points for him since the survey was last conducted in October.
Pete Buttigieg, 38, is Sanders’s closest rival as the first choice for 18% of Iowa Democrats likely to caucus on Feb. 3. The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is followed by former Vice President Joe Biden, 77, who was the preferred candidate for 17% of those polled. Their share of the vote remains exactly the same compared to the fall survey.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren, Sanders’s ideological ally, has hemorrhaged support, dropping from 22% in October to 15% as White House hopefuls make their closing arguments to Democrats in the first-in-the-nation state. The Massachusetts senator, 70, topped the poll last time it was fielded, but she has struggled to regain momentum after she was confronted regarding her plan to fund her vision of “Medicare for all.”
Although Sanders is experiencing a late surge in Iowa, finishing first in the gold-standard Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll earlier in January, Saturday’s survey found 55% of Iowa Democrats wanted a standard-bearer “more moderate than most Democrats” in comparison to 38% who wished for one who was “more liberal than most Democrats,” though 40% of respondents could still change their mind.
Researchers for the New York Times and Siena College polled 584 Democratic likely caucusgoers between Jan. 20 to Jan. 23. Its findings have a margin of error of plus or minus 4.8 percentage points.
