Biden is still at the top of a shifting field
50% overall say Trump will be reelected
Warren rises in new poll; voters suggest they could still be swayed.
WASHINGTON – Former Vice President Joe Biden continues to lead a turbulent field for the Democratic presidential nomination, a national USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds, but his margin over Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been slashed in half. And most Democratic voters say they could still change their minds.
Almost exactly one year before Election Day – and 96 days before the opening Iowa caucuses – Biden was backed by 26% of likely Democratic primary and caucus voters in the survey. Warren was second at 17%, followed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders at 13% and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 10%.
Biden’s lead over Warren, now 9 percentage points, was 18 points in the last USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll, taken in late August. His standing has fallen by 6 points since then; hers has risen by 3.
“My front-runner would be Biden,” Nathaniel Dortch, 77, an Air Force retiree from Moreno Valley, California, who was among those surveyed, said in a follow-up interview. Then he added, “I want to wait and see.”
In a sign of the prospect for changes ahead, 18% of likely Democratic voters were undecided. Among those with a preferred candidate, a 57% majority said their minds weren’t firmly made up.
“My front-runner would be Biden ... I want to wait and see.” Nathaniel Dortch survey respondent
“I am undecided in supporting a specific candidate right now because I am not looking for the issue differential, I want someone best equipped to take on Donald Trump,” said Freyr Thor, 56, a tech CEO from South Pasadena, California. He’s worried about what he’s seen, and hasn’t seen, in the Democrats’ televised debates so far. “No one has shown me they can take on Trump, including Biden.”
In a match-up between President Trump and an unnamed Democratic nominee, Trump narrowly led, 41%39%, with 10% supporting an unnamed third-party candidate. Another 10% were undecided. That was a shift, albeit one within the margin of error, from the August survey, when the unnamed Democrat held a narrow lead over Trump, 41%-39%.
In the new poll, Republicans expressed overwhelming confidence about the outcome of the election, with 86% predicting the president would win. Seventy-five percent of Democrats said their nominee would win. But independents by a doubledigit margin expected Trump to prevail.
Despite the cloud of impeachment, overall those surveyed predicted by 50%-40% that the president in the end would claim a second term.
“Trump has done a lot of the things he has set out to do,” said John Siefkas, 52, a farmer and political independent from Osceola, Iowa, who was called in the poll. “He needs to keep his hands off Twitter, (but) he is doing some stuff that is needing done that people haven’t had the guts to do.”
William Collins, 56, an independent who is a retired police investigator from Fort Valley, Virginia, also plans to vote for the president. “I believe Trump has directed America in the right direction, and I think he really has the American people in his own heart.”
Trump’s job-approval rating was 46% approve-52% disapprove, with 27% saying they “strongly” approved and 37% saying they “strongly” disapproved.
The telephone poll of 1,000 registered voters nationwide, taken Oct. 2326, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The sample of 399 likely Democratic voters has an error margin of 4.9 points; the sample of 323 likely Republican voters has an error margin of 5.5 points.