Joe Biden received some bad news in an Iowa poll released hours before the state’s first-in-the-nation caucus for the Democratic presidential primary.
The former vice president, 77, dropped 9 percentage points in the final survey of likely Iowa caucus-goers released Monday by Democratic Party pollster David Binder.
Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, 38, took first place in the poll with 19% support, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 78, landed in second at 17%. Both have trended up since the last iteration of the poll in early January.
Biden fell to third with 15% support, tying with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 70. Both Biden’s and Warren’s numbers in this poll show a downward trend in their support.
Binder’s Jan. 28-30 poll has a relatively small sample size of 300 and bears a margin of error of 5.7 percentage points.
In the days leading up to the first-in-the-nation caucus, Biden’s campaign has slumped while some of his competitors have gained momentum, even as his competitors from the Senate, Sanders and Warren, have been pulled away from the campaign trail to participate in President Trump’s impeachment trial.
Sanders has been forced to leave much of his last-minute campaigning to surrogates such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Still, Sanders’s support seems to have remained energized and put the senator in the lead in Iowa in a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Jan. 25.
Biden, who generally leads in nationwide polls, has slipped in Iowa and trails Sanders in the RealClearPolitics polling average of Iowa polls by a margin of 23 points to 19 points. Buttigieg, who surged past both septuagenarians in Binder’s poll, sits at roughly 17 points in the RealClearPolitics average.
