Vice President Joe Biden has made significant gains in the national Democratic primary polls in recent weeks, with a new Bloomberg poll showing a quarter of registered Democratic primary voters supportin him, his best numbers yet.
Bloomberg still finds Hillary Clinton leading the field with 31 percent support, just 8 points higher than Biden’s 25 percent. Coming in almost even with Biden is Vermont senator Bernie Sanders at 24 percent, while former Virginia senator Jim Webb as 2 percent support and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley has 1 percent. All except Biden are declared candidates.
Among the three leading candidates, Biden has the highest favorability with Democrats, with 80 percent viewing him favorably and just 14 percent viewing him unfavorably. For Clinton, those figures are 70 percent favorable, 25 percent unfavorable; for Sanders, 56 percent favorable, 9 percent unfavorable.
It’s worth noting the sample of Democrats is relatively small at 375, and there was a margin of error of +/- 5.1 points. Still, the Real Clear Politics average of national polls shows Biden’s fortunes trending upward as the vice president continues to discuss jumping into the Democratic primary.
There is evidence also that Biden would perform better with the general electorate than would Clinton. When asking the whole pool’s sample of 1,001 registered voters, Biden has a better favorability/unfavorability rating (49/41) than Clinton (38/54). That’s Biden’s best rating in Bloomberg’s poll since December 2012, when he earned similar numbers, but it’s Clinton’s worse numbers since Bloomberg first began asking about her favorability as secretary of state in 2009.
As Biden continues to weigh a presidential run, often openly in the media, the Clinton campaign is reportedly “subtly warning” the vice president’s team not to go through with it.
