Former Vice President Joe Biden , who held a commanding lead for a majority of the early 2020 presidential election campaign season and then watched his numbers begin to slip, received a new and presumably much-appreciated boost in two states that have the potential to light the path to a nomination.
According to The Hill , Biden’s first bit of good news came out of Iowa from an Emerson College poll which revealed that he managed to pull ahead of Iowa-dominant South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg . Biden was able to top Buttigieg by one point, which is significant in the sense that the 38-year-old Midwestern mayor has dominated in the early-caucusing state in recent weeks in a number of other state polls.
Secondly, a WBUR/Mass/NC poll which surveyed New Hampshire voters gave Biden a slight edge over Buttigieg, who has also experienced a surge in what is looked at as a critical early-voting state. Biden managed to pull in 18 percent of support in the poll while Buttigieg trailed him at 17 percent.
Given the poll’s 4.7 percent margin of error, the two Democratic candidates statistically tied, indicating that voters in the state still haven’t chosen their frontrunner for 2020.
According to Biden’s campaign, staying strong in New Hampshire and Iowa can build momentum to eventually grab a win in South Carolina, where Biden has traditionally favored well with the state’s primarily African American voting bloc. However, a recent South Carolina Change Research-Post and Courier poll showed a rare dip in support from the state.
Biden, who has managed to hold a strong lead against his closest competitors in South Carolina, managed to garner 27 percent of support for the clear win. But Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders made a strong showing as well, securing 20 percent of support, which marks a rare occasion of Biden not holding a double-digit lead over his closest competitor.
On the national poll front, Biden remains the clear leader. Though Sen. Elizabeth Warren saw a noticeable surge in past months, she still hasn’t managed to topple Biden nationally. And the former vice president, while facing an onslaught of political attacks by President Donald Trump over the Ukraine controversy, hasn’t suffered any real damage in polling as a result, The Hill reported.
A Biden campaign official recently indicated that though Trump’s impeachment seems to be the hot topic of the day, given the extreme media coverage, Americans are still more concerned with the issues that affect them on a daily basis and suggested they care more about what the next president has to offer over an impeachment trial.
“It’s easy to get sucked into the universe that we’re all in where we feel like impeachment is dominating every headline, but for most voters, it’s really not,” Biden’s campaign official said.
