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Former Vice President Joe Biden has been the frontrunner in the race to become the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee since before he entered the race in April.
As The New American has repeatedly reported, he held what seemed to be an insurmountable lead. Just two weeks ago, some polls showed him as much as 20 points ahead of his rivals.
But now, the Real Clear Politics average shows that Senator Elizabeth Warren, who finally surpassed and eclipsed communist apologist Bernie Sanders, is running neck-and-neck with the former veep.
Warren defeated Biden in four of the last seven RCP polls, but such was Biden’s lead in two of them that he still holds the top slot by a thin 2.2 points.
The race for the Democrat nomination is all but tied. It’s Biden vs. Warren.
The Numbers
Warren’s rise is something of a surprise given Biden’s long stretch as the leader. The RCP average showed him in firm command of the race since October last year, consistently leading by a margin in the high 20s and low 30s. One poll gave him a 37-point advantage.
The latest Economist/YouGov poll, September 28 to October 1, gave Warren a 6.6-point lead over Biden, 28-22. She’s 15 points ahead of socialist Sanders. The Economist/YouGov poll of September 22-24 had Warren ahead by one point.
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In a Monmouth survey of September 23-29, Warren led by three points, 28-25, with Sanders wheezing in 13 points behind at 15.
Warren led the Quinnipiac poll of September 19-23 by two points, 27-25. Sanders was at 16.
Biden still commands the RCP lead because two polls — Politico/Morning Consult, September 23-29, and Harvard/Harris, September 22-24 — have him 11 points ahead of Warren, 32-21 and 28-17.
Emerson’s poll gives Biden a 25-23 advantage.
Biden’s lead in the RCP New Hampshire average is the same, 2.2. But in Iowa, he’s losing. That RCP average gives Warren a lead of 2.7, 23-20.3.
Warren’s largest margin in the Iowa polls came from an Iowa State University survey, September 13-17. Warren bested Biden by eight points, 24-16.
Bottom line: Warren, again, has all but tied Biden and knocked Sanders into third. He’s polling at 16.8, RCP shows, and has reached the 20s in only two of the last 14 polls.
Heart Trouble
Those numbers aren’t Sanders’ only trouble. The 78-year-old socialist landed in the hospital with chest pain on Wednesday. Doctors found a blocked coronary artery and placed two stents to reopen it.
Sanders’ handlers won’t say whether he suffered a heart attack. But writing at Slate, Jeremy Faust, an emergency doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, suggested that a heart attack is exactly what he had.
Wrote Faust:
A 78-year-old man with a medical history of gout and diverticulitis comes to the emergency department after developing chest discomfort while at a work function.
The patient’s overall clinical scenario is concerning enough that he is admitted to the hospital, where interventional cardiologists urgently perform a procedure called a cardiac catheterization. When the doctors inject dye into the major coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart, they find that one of them is so severely blocked that they must immediately place two stents in an effort to restore normal blood flow and hopefully prevent cardiac tissue around it from dying….
Even the scant information we have — that he had stents inserted overnight following an acute cardiac episode — is enough to be able to say: This was very likely a heart attack.
The other possibility, Faust wrote, is stable or unstable angina, the latter of which “carries just as poor a prognosis as many, though not all, heart attacks” and is likely what Sanders had if the chest pain wasn’t a heart attack.
Sanders has canceled campaign appearances temporarily, and “when Mr. Sanders returns to the campaign, he may find what was already his biggest challenge — finding new converts to his mission — to be even more difficult,” the New York Times reported.
That’s because the health issue makes it “harder for him to persuade new supporters to come into his column because this will at least be in the back of people’s minds,” a veteran Democrat strategist told the Times.
The next few rounds of RCP data might settle that question and send Sanders a message: A 78-year-old man shouldn’t run for president.
Photo: AP Images
