Elizabeth Warren Pulls Ahead Of Joe Biden In National Poll

Politico reports that the Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday morning shows Warren pulling ahead of Biden by two points, 27% to 25%, among Democrats and “Democratic-leaning independents” who plan to vote in the 2020 election.

That’s still within the poll’s margin of error, as Politico points out, but there’s no denying that Warren’s campaign is on the upswing and that she’s taking voters who may have previously pledged themselves to Joe Biden. In the last Quinnipiac national poll, taken around this time in August, Biden was comfortably ahead of Warren, 32% to just 19%.

At the time the previous poll was taken, Biden seemed well-positioned to sail to the nomination, leaving the 20 or so contenders in the dust even before the third set of Democratic National Committee debates, set to take place in October, just a year out of the presidential election. But Biden has never been a “sure thing,” and as voters tuned into the Democratic primary race, his numbers declined markedly.

Biden’s problems are systemic. First, assuming he was the party’s inevitable nominee, Biden didn’t do much on the ground campaigning in early primary states — even as other Democrats, like Warren, started their tours of Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina back in the spring. Now playing catch-up, Biden has given speech after gaffe-filled speech, engendering little confidence in his nascent presidential campaign.