Sleepy Joe Biden seems to have arisen from his slumbers.
The latest Real Clear Politics national polling average gives the leading Democrat candidate for president a comfortable lead of more than eight points over his closest rival to become the party’s nominee for president, Elizabeth Warren.
Yet Warren — she of the purloined cookbook recipes — is still showing strong support among voters in the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Sanders is still in third, where he has been for some time.
In other news about the race, Pete Buttigieg, the homosexual mayor of South Bend, Indiana, says the Democrat race is narrowing and might well become a contest between him and Warren.
Biden’s Latest Numbers
The latest figures for Biden put him firmly in command of the race, at least nationally.
He’s running 8.8 points head of Warren, 29.1-20.3. Sanders is third with the support of 17.1 percent of voters, and Buttigieg fourth at 7.1.
But Biden prevailed in the 10 polls since Warren last won. That was Quinnipiac, October 17-21. Warren won that survey by seven.
But again, since then, Biden has been unbeatable. While Warren has approached to within one, two, four, and five points, Biden’s margin in five of the polls was between eight and 15 points.
That last was the Harvard-Harris survey of October 29-31. In the Politico/Morning Consult poll of October 21-27, Biden bested Warren 32-20, a wide 12-point margin. In the Fox News poll of October 27-20, Biden cleared Warren by 10, 31-21.
Warren has won just one of the last 15 polls and four of the last 20.
Biden won eight of those polls by double digits.
A month ago, Warren had pulled to within a half-point of Biden, but since that dip the former vice president has been gradually rebuilding his lead.
Message: Nationally, Biden is still the preferred choice of polled voters.
Iowa, New Hampshire
The numbers aren’t so positive for Biden in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Warren leads the race in Iowa, where voters caucus on February 3, by 5.3 points. But Biden isn’t the man she leads. Polling second in the Hawkeye State with 17-percent support is Buttigieg, who has bested Biden in two of the last three polls.
Biden is polling at 15.7 points, just a shade ahead of socialist Sanders’ 15.3.
In New Hampshire, where voters go to the polls on February 11, Warren leads Biden 25-21, with Sanders just behind Biden at 20. Buttigieg is in a distant fourth with 8.7
Two-way Race
Buttigieg believes the contest is narrowing and the race might come down to just him and Warren, possibly on the strength of his survey numbers in Iowa.
“I think this is getting to be a two-way,” he told political journalist John Heileman last week. “It’s early to say, I’m not saying that it is a two-way. A world where we’re getting somewhere is where it’s coming down to the two of us.”
How Buttigieg deduced his strength relative to the other candidates is a mystery given that he’s 13 points behind Warren in the RCP national average. Iowa, after all, is just one contest, and he’s farther behind his competitors in New Hampshire than he is nationally.
That said, Buttigieg also told Heilemann that Biden is not invincible.
“Either he is the unstoppable front-runner,” he said, “and we can all go home, or he is not. Anybody who’s in this race is pure on the assumption that he’s not.”
Yesterday, speaking to This Week’s George Stephanopoulos, Buttigieg said the taxpayers needn’t spend $20.5 trillion on healthcare, as Warren would, but what is necessary is a “Douglass Plan” for black Americans because “systemic racism … threatens the entire republic.”
“We need a 21st century Voting Rights Act,” he said.
Buttigieg’s website says the plan is a “comprehensive and intentional dismantling of racist structures and systems combined with an equally intentional and affirmative investment of unprecedented scale in the freedom and self-determination of black Americans.”
What that would cost he has not made clear, but he seems as unconcerned about that as Warren is about a $20.5 trillion healthcare bureaucracy that, she avers, will not require a tax increase on the middle class.
Photo: AP Images
