Shock Poll: Bernie Sanders Takes Lead In NBC News National Poll For First Time
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Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has taken the lead for the first time — albeit a slim one — in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal national Democratic primary poll, beating former Vice President Joe Biden by a single point.
With just days to go before Democrats begin casting votes, Sanders is in a statistical dead heat with Biden in the poll:
Sanders gets 27 percent support from Democratic primary voters around the country, while Biden gets 26 percent. Sanders’ single-point advantage, while well within the poll’s +/- 4.74 percentage point margin of error, marks his first lead of the primary in the NBC/WSJ survey.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the only other Democrat registering in double digits, at 15 percent, while former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg now holds the fourth place spot, at 9 percent. Former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg gets 7 percent support in the poll; Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar has 5 percent, and businessman Andrew Yang stands at 4 percent. No other candidate has 3 percent support or more.
With the caveats that this is a poll with a small sample size and the accompanying margin of error, there has been a lot of movement for Sanders in January. State polling has been all over the place, but there have been multiple signs of Sanders surges in Iowa and New Hampshire
The good news for Biden is that he didn’t lose any significant support in this poll from the prior month, which has been the case generally in national polls. Sanders appears to be picking up support from other candidates, and from previously undecided voters. And Biden still holds significant to overwhelming leads in the third and fourth states on the Democratic calendar — South Carolina and Nevada.
The other big story is the rise of former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg into the second tier, nipping at Warren’s feet. Bloomberg hasn’t participated in a single debate, and has spent a quarter of a billion dollars to put himself on the edge of double digits in the Democratic race, just behind the candidate who proposes taxing two percent of Bloomberg’s wealth.
