Elizabeth Warren Gains Ground On Joe Biden In South Carolina Poll, A Key Early-Voting State
Though former Vice President Joe Biden held a decisive lead in a majority of state and national polls over the summer, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has enjoyed a steady surge since her strong Democratic debate performances, which have either given her the lead in some of those polls or taken her closer to the top spot.
According to The Hill, a new Post and Courier poll out of the crucial early-voting state of South Carolina revealed an interesting turn of events for several of the top candidates, including Warren, Biden and Pete Buttigieg.
The survey showed that Biden still maintains the lead in South Carolina with 30 percent polling support, but that number is down 6 percent from the last iteration of the same poll in August. Adding more pain to his recent trend of dipping poll numbers was Warren’s two-point uptick since the August poll, giving her second place with 19 percent support.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Warren’s top progressive opponent in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, managed to snag 13 percent support. Rounding out the top five was Sen. Kamala Harris with 11 percent and Buttigieg with 9 percent — which was an impressive four-point increase for the South Bend, Indiana, mayor.
For a quick timeline of Biden’s obvious decrease in South Carolina voter support, in May, he was leading his closest competitor by a staggering 31 points. That dropped to 20 points in June, followed by 19 points in August. October continued the downtrend as he now only holds an 11-point lead over his next closest competitor.
Though the former vice president typically shows strong support among the African American community, surprisingly, his downturn is at least partly credited to female voters in the demographic. Biden dropped 13 points month-over-month for African American women alone and lost 10 points overall in the state’s female voting bloc.
The Post and Courier poll had a 3.6 percent margin of error and the survey included 731 likely Democratic South Carolina voters.
Unfortunately for Biden, the bad polling news from Friday came in the wake of other polls throughout the week that exclusively placed him behind Warren, as previously reported by The Inquisitr.
A Thursday Civiqs poll out of Iowa — an early voting state that candidates unleash fierce fights to win — revealed that Warren took a strong 16-point lead on Biden, clearly taking away his front-runner status, according to the survey results.
The poll showed Warren with 28 percent of support from likely voters, with Biden only nabbing 12 percent. Buttigieg and Sanders both managed to top Biden in the poll as well.
Warren scored the top position across nearly every demographic in the poll, short of losing slightly to Sanders with independents and youth voters.
