Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren has opened up a huge lead over former favorite Joe Biden, according to a new NextGen poll. Biden, however, retains his overall lead among all likely Democrat voters.
As Yahoo News reports, a poll of 4,418 likely Democrat voters shows that the younger contingent of the party’s base favors Warren, and not Biden. However, at this point it bears noting that this particular poll wasn’t conducted with the scientific rigor required of most polling. Rather than polling a random sample of likely Democrat voters, the poll sampled only users who had signed up to the email and text-message lists for NextGen, a Political Action Committee (PAC) run by billionaire liberal activist Tom Steyer.
“The results cannot be extrapolated to the electorate as a whole, or even Democratic primary voters,” notes Yahoo News writer Brittany Shepherd.
Flaws in the poll’s methodology aside, it does point to an issue that is likely to be a factor in the race for the 2020 Democratic Party’s presidential nomination: namely, that younger voters are interested in a candidate who’s further to the left than the front-runner, establishment candidate Biden.
Among poll respondents aged 18 to 35, Warren is in the lead, with 39 percent of likely Democrat voters supporting her. Biden is in second place, with 26 percent.
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That voting bloc is not to be ignored — voters in that age group vote at higher rates than do their older counterparts, according to a May Yahoo News report. Voters in the 18-35 age group are expected to make up about 10 percent of the electorate in the 2020 election.
The recent poll did not, however, take Donald Trump into the equation, inasmuch as it was a poll of Democrat voters by a Democratic think-tank. However, as The Independent reported earlier in June, just about every major Democratic candidate was expected to beat Trump, according to wide-ranging polls that sampled all likely voters.
Meanwhile, the results of the NextGen poll portray a problem within the Democratic Party that’s been noticed by other political analysts: namely, that there’s a wide and growing disconnect between voters who favor establishment candidates (which is to say, Biden), and voters who favor more left-leaning candidates such as Bernie Sanders.
That disconnect may well spell doom for the party’s hopes of retaking the White House in 2020, according to some analysts. As previously reported by The Inquisitr , the Democrats’ failure to connect with voters on issues that matter to them, and their likely support of a flawed, establishment candidate, could very well cause a repeat of the 2020 election, in which polls favored Hillary Clinton — polls which proved wrong when Donald Trump won the election.
