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The latest leftist media narrative is that Joe Biden might just lose the Democratic nomination to which he was comfortably heading before the first two Democratic debates, at which opponent Kamala Harris, the pot-passionate ex of former California House Speaker Willie Brown, implied that Sleepy Joe was tight as an Alabama tick with Southern segregationists.
Harris shot up in the polls. And Warren, we learned last week, “surged.”
So now, Bloomberg-Quint tells us of Biden, “there are growing signs that his third bid for the presidency is anything but inevitable.”
Maybe, but other signs are that Biden is the preferred candidate among rank-and-file Democrats. The Real Clear Politics average gives him a 13.6-point lead over Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Biden polls higher in the RCP average now than he did in early July.
Biden Is Vulnerable
“The former vice president offers a message of inclusivity with a moderate policy agenda aimed squarely at President Donald Trump in the general election,” Bloomberg scribe Jennifer Epstein wrote. “But a wide range vulnerabilities, already evident in polling, fundraising and field organization, could get in the way.”
No doubt, as Epstein reported, Biden’s no sure thing. He faces two dozen opponents, and he entered the campaign late. But “most worrisome … is that he doesn’t appear to excite passions among Democratic voters or insiders like the last two nominees.”
“There’s almost universal fondness for him with Democrats but the intensity isn’t there. Everybody in the party sees him as a really good man, he’s likable, he’s Uncle Joe,” said another operative, Brian Fallon, Clinton’s 2016 press secretary. “There are other candidates that can build an intense following that could prove his support to be soft. But it remains to be seen.”
While Biden leads in virtually every poll, his margin has begun to narrow as Harris and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren have risen in standing along with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. In a CBS News battleground tracker poll of Democrats released Sunday, for instance, Biden was the first choice of 25% of those surveyed. Warren was at 20%, followed by Harris at 16% and Sanders at 15%.
And Biden wasn’t given especially high marks for the campaign he’s run so far, with 32% saying Harris has been strongest, with 24% tipping toward Warren and 22% saying Biden.
No one bump in the road for Biden — his habit of hugging and touching, his treatment of Anita Hill in the early 1990s, his recollection of good relationships with segregationist senators — has knocked him out of the lead yet.
Beyond all that, Biden’s long tenure in politics, which goes back to President Nixon’s defeat of George McGovern on November 7, 1972, hasn’t meant much as endorsements go. “Biden, with 15, barely edges out Harris and [Senator Cory] Booker, with 12 each, for formal endorsements from members of Congress,” Epstein wrote.
The Polls
However much Harris and Warren are “surging” up to or past elderly comsymp Bernie Sanders, now enmeshed in a row over starving campaign workers, the Real Clear Politics average shows Biden with a handy lead.
Polling at 28.6 percent of Democrat voters, Biden leads Warren and Sanders by 13.6 points. Harris is polling at 12, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg is at five percent. Of the other candidates — O’Rourke, Yang, Booker, Gabbard, Castro, Klobuchar, Bullock, and Steyer — not a one is at three percent.
Whatever that CBS poll shows, others depict the race differently. A Politico/Morning Consult poll, for instance, put Biden ahead of Sanders by 15 points, 33-18. Warren is at 14, a 19-point lead for Biden. Harris is 20 points behind.
Beyond that, here’s what Epstein didn’t report: Biden’s lead has increased 2.6 points since early July, when RCP showed Biden at 26, 10.8 points ahead of Harris, 14 points ahead of Sanders, and 13.8 points ahead of Warren.
Granted, the CBS poll is not included in the current RCP average. Still, the voters who talk to pollsters are consistently falling into Biden’s camp.
That hasn’t changed since October.
What that will mean in the primaries is open to question, particularly given Biden’s vulnerabilities: his age, his color, his past, and his metronomic emission of gaffes. He is a two-time loser.
As for now, the polls do not show that Biden’s opponents are close to passing him.
Photo: AP Images
