Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has caught up to former vice president Joe Biden and surged past Senator Elizabeth Warren, a new national poll shows.
About 27 percent of registered Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters support Sanders while only 24 percent support Biden, according to a new CNN poll. The difference in support is within the poll’s margin of error, leaving unclear who is now in the lead.
Sanders has made significant gains among voters over the last several weeks, surging seven points since last month’s CNN poll of the 2020 presidential race. Biden, by contrast, has maintained his front-runner status since making a late entry into the race last year.
Meanwhile, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts sits well behind them at 14 percent. Every other 2020 Democrat garners less support, with former South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 11 percent, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg at 5 percent, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and businessman Andrew Yang both at 4 percent, and billionaire Tom Steyer at 2 percent.
Enthusiasm about a Sanders Democratic nomination among the party’s voters has also remained about level since October while it has simultaneously dropped for Biden and Warren. Roughly 38 percent of Democratic voters say they would be enthusiastic about Sanders getting the nomination, while enthusiasm for a Biden nomination has sunk 9 points to 34 percent and dropped 12 points to 29 percent for Warren.
Sanders has been on the receiving end over the last few weeks of a flurry of attacks by his presidential rivals as well as other prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton.
The Vermont independent denied the Warren campaign’s claim during a private meeting in 2018 that he did not think a woman could win a general election against President Trump.
“Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million votes,” said Sanders, who lost the Democratic nomination to Clinton in 2016. “How could anybody in a million years not believe that a woman could become president of the United States?”
Clinton, meanwhile, reopened an old wound from the last election cycle when she claimed this week that “nobody likes” Sanders.
“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done,” Clinton told The Hollywood Reporter. “He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
The latest CNN poll was conducted by phone from January 16 through 19 among 1,156 adults across the country.