Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Poll shows Biden with 36-point lead over Sanders
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has a commanding lead over Bernie Sanders in Florida with one week before the state’s presidential primary.
The former vice president has the support of 61% of Democratic primary voters in a poll released Tuesday by Florida Atlantic University a 19-point increase since January.
That puts Biden 36 points ahead of the other candidate, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has 25%. FAU said 10% of the Florida voters it surveyed Thursday through Saturday were undecided, and another 3% said they’d vote for the one remaining candidate in the race, U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.
Biden has been gaining in Florida even before many of the other candidates for the Democratic nomination started dropping out and endorsing him following his wins in primaries in South Carolina and in an array of Super Tuesday states.
And leading Florida Democrats began distancing themselves from Sanders after comments he made in a Feb. 23 “60 Minutes” interview in which he said it was “unfair to simply say everything is bad” about the Cuban revolution led and presided over by the late dictator Fidel Castro.
Sanders’ praise for Castro’s literacy program, and refusal to back down from his comments, led some state Democrats to predict he’d hurt the party in Florida if he became the party’s nominee. In January, with many more candidates in the race, Biden had 42%, up from 34% in FAU’s September poll.
Sanders support has increased 9 points since January, after months of remaining remarkably steady. He had 16% in FAU’s January poll, 14% in September and 12% in May.
“Florida has been a strong Biden firewall state since we started polling a year ago,” Monica Escaleras, director of the Business and Economics Polling Initiative said in a written analysis of the results. “With voters’ attitudes becoming more fixed on their choices, there is nothing in this data that suggests a change in the direction of this race at this time.”
Opinions of the candidates have solidified with 79% saying they’ll vote for their current choice. In January, just 54% were locked in and 46% saying they might change their minds and vote for someone else.
Generational split
As in other states, there’s a generational divide over Biden and Sanders.
■ Sanders leads Biden 35% to 15% among 18 to 29-year-olds.
■ Biden leads Sanders 58% to 34% among people aged 30 to 49.
■ Biden leads 71% to 19% among people 50 to 64.
■ Biden leads 85% to 13% among voters 65 and older.
Trump vs. Democrats
In head to head matchups between President Donald Trump and either Biden or Sanders, a larger FAU poll of Democrats, Republicans and no party affiliation/independent voters, the president is slightly ahead in the contest for Florida’s 29 electoral votes.
Trump leads Biden 51% to 49%, and Trump leads Sanders 53% to 47%.
The results are an uptick for Trump and a decline for the Democrats. In January, Biden was ahead of Trump, 51% to 49%, and Sanders led Trump 53% to 47%.
The tight matchups “illustrate that Florida is going to be once again one of the most pivotal states in the general election,” said Kevin Wagner, an FAU political scientist and research fellow at the Business and Economics Polling Initiative.
Fine print
The latest results come from an FAU Business and Economics Polling Initiative survey of 399 Florida registered Democrats conducted online and through automated calls to people with landline telephones from Thursday through Saturday.
It had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points. The larger survey of 1,216 voters used for the head-to-head matchups had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.