Poll: Sanders takes strong 2-to-1 lead in California
Primary: Sanders, Warren the only candidates positioned to win state’s delegates
Sen. Bernie Sanders has consolidated his already strong lead in California’s Democratic presidential primary, stretching ahead of his closest competitor by a 2-to-1 margin that could result in his winning a majority of the state’s delegates next week, a new poll released Friday found.
The poll, conducted by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies for the Los Angeles Times over the last week, gives Sanders 34% support among likely Democratic primary voters.
That puts him well ahead of the second-place candidate, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who nabbed 17% — a notable drop since September, when she was the race’s front-runner.
Trailing Warren is former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg with 12% support; former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg with 11%; former Vice President Joe Biden with 8%; and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar with 6%. Former San Francisco hedge fund chief Tom Steyer hovers at
2%.
Biden also saw a precipitous drop in support since June, losing many older, moderate voters who have decamped for Bloomberg. Warren, meanwhile, remains the top second choice for those supporting other candidates.
California’s primary will dole out 415 pledged delegates — more than any other state — but only to candidates scraping at least 15% of the vote either statewide or in individual congressional districts.
Sanders and Warren are the only candidates now reaching that milestone, the Berkeley poll found — meaning that the two progressives would split all of the 144 delegates that are doled out based on the statewide results.
Based on estimates of poll respondents in each congressional district, Sanders is estimated to receive about two-thirds of the total delegates in the state and would likely win at least some delegates in nearly every congressional district. Warren would likely reach the threshold for delegates in about half of the 53 districts, Bloomberg and Buttigieg would qualify in a quarter of the districts, and Biden, Klobuchar and Steyer might end up with no delegates at all, according to the Berkeley pollsters.
It’s an especially worrying result for Biden. The former vice president appears likely to win today’s South Carolina primary, which would boost his argument that he’s the best choice for anti-Sanders voters to unify around. But he has almost no on-theground operation in California to help turn out his supporters, and he could find it extremely difficult to catch up with the Vermont senator in later primaries if he misses out on delegates here.
Sanders, who boasts a strong organization here, has a majority of support among three key groups of voters: Californians who consider themselves “very liberal,” from whom he gets about 50% support; Latino voters, who make up about a quarter of the likely electorate and support him by a similar margin; and younger voters. The Vermont senator takes 61% of voters between ages 18 and 29, and 53% of those in their 30s.
The results also contain a warning for Democratic leaders who are hoping to stop Sanders from winning the nomination. While 79% of likely Democratic primary voters said they are “absolutely certain” they would vote for the Democratic nominee in the general election even if it isn’t their preferred candidate, only 68% of Sanders supporters said they were absolutely certain they would do so — the lowest percentage of any major Democratic candidate.
While that might not be a problem in deep-blue California, a similar rate of defections by disgruntled Sanders fans in swing states might hamstring the Democratic nominee in the general election.
The poll, conducted online in both English and Spanish, surveyed 3,002 likely Democratic primary voters and has a margin of error of about 2 percentage points in either direction. The poll was in the field from Feb. 20-25 — which means it ended the same day as Tuesday’s presidential debate, so the impact of that face-off isn’t taken into account.