Sleepy Joe Biden has, apparently, awakened.
The increasingly gaffe-prone Democrat presidential candidate has regained the lead from socialist Bernie Sanders and posted double-digit margins in the last three polls tallied for the Real Clear Politics average.
After Sanders rolled over Biden in the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and New Hampshire primary, he shot ahead of Biden in the RCP average.
The lead didn’t last long. Having crushed Sanders in South Carolina, and then on Super Tuesday, the RCP average has Biden ahead once again.
The Numbers
The latest three polls have Biden firmly in command of the race as endorsements from former opponents keep coming.
The CNN survey of March 4-7 gives Biden a 16-point margin among Democrat voters, 52 percent to 36.
A Morning Consult poll of March 5 ended in a similar defeat for the 1930s pro-Soviet candidate. Biden won, 54-38.
A March 4-5 survey from Reuters/Ipsos gave Biden a 13-point cushion, 45-32.
Biden won the three previous polls with smaller margins.
Before those, Sanders won 20 straight polls going back to an Economist/YouGov survey of February 9-11. His largest margin was 16 points in the ABC/WashPost poll of February 14-17. Sanders prevailed in that one 32-16.
Sanders won all but two of 25 polls in February, and was, seemingly, poised to win the race after the early caucus and primary victories.
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Sanders’ Collapse
But then came Biden’s victory in the Palmetto State. He won 48.4 percent of the vote to Sanders’ 19.9 percent, and walked off with 39 of the state’s 54 delegates. Sanders took 15.
On Super Tuesday, Biden prevailed. He won 610 of the 1,344 delegates at stake, which brought his total to 664 against Sanders’ 573.
Biden’s comeback is, in some sense, anticlimactic.
He led the RCP average with commanding margins in almost every poll going back to October 2018, and sometimes posted leads of more than 30 points.
In other words, apart from February’s slight dip when Sanders surged, Biden was and is the favored candidate to face President Trump on November 3.
As for forthcoming state contests, the RCP averages have Biden way ahead of Sanders.
The former veep is ahead by 22.5 points in 125-delegate Michigan, 52.5-33. Michiganders go to the polls tomorrow.
He’s even farther ahead in Florida, with a primary date of March 17 and 219 delegates. He leads Sanders 51.5-14, or by 37.5.
Georgians, who will award 105 delegates on March 24, favor Biden 32-14, the latest poll shows.
Other states show similar results.
Endorsements, Worries
And the polls aren’t Sanders’ only bad news. As competitors for the Democrat nomination have dropped out they have endorsed the Castro partisan’s rival.
Cory Booker has endorsed Biden, as have Kamala Harris, Amy Klochubar, and Pete Buttigieg.
Biden’s revival notwithstanding, some Democrats worry about his mental decline.
A Sanders backer tweeted this remark: “Democratic insiders know Biden has cognitive decline issues. They joke about it. They don’t care.”
“The steadfast, wilful refusal of Dem political & media elites to address what is increasingly visible to the naked eye — Biden’s serious cognitive decline — is frightening indeed, not only for what it portends for 2020 but what it says about the ease of snapping them into line,” tweeted Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald.
Greenwald was answering a tweet from one of his reporters, Ryan Grim: “Not a single Biden supporter argued that he’s not actually sundowning and it’s being blown out of proportion,” he tweeted. “Even (and especially) his supporters know it’s happening. This is frightening.”
Last week, Biden forgot President Obama’s last name, and before that, called the Declaration of Independence the “thing” after a confused, garbled attempt to remember it’s opening, “we hold these truths.”
He also confused his wife and his sister, and just yesterday, asked for the support of “O’Biden-Bama” Democrats.
As Miranda Devine wrote in the New York Post, Biden appeared not to know what happened when a crazy vegan jumped on the stage at a campaign event last week.
“The truth is that anyone who has seen Biden up close knows he has some sort of cognitive impairment,” she observed. “He often seems bewildered, can’t remember what state he is in, if he’s running for the Senate or the presidency or even whether it’s Super Tuesday or ‘Super Thursday.’”
Democrats had been worried what would happen if they nominated Sanders, a man who praises Fidel Castro, would nationalize energy production, and employs staff members who promised mass murder and concentration camps if their man wins and burning cities if he loses.
Now they must worry about a candidate who, many say, is in serious “cognitive decline.”
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
