New poll shows Trump trailing Biden and four other Democrats
Washington (AFP) – A nationwide Fox News poll released Sunday shows President Donald Trump trailing former vice president Joe Biden and no fewer than four other Democratic contenders as early campaigning for the 2020 election begins to gain steam.
A separate survey of battleground states, by CBS, shows Democrats strongly favor Biden as the candidate most likely to beat Trump in next year’s elections.
The Fox poll showed Biden leading Trump by 49 percent to 39 percent among all registered voters nationwide, while Senator Bernie Sanders held nearly the same advantage over the president, at 49 percent to 40 percent.
Holding edges of 1 or 2 points over Trump — albeit within the poll’s 3-point margin of error — were Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, as well as Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.
The polling comes more than 500 days before the November 3, 2020 election, an eternity in the political world. One widely viewed tweet this week shows five presidential candidates in recent decades who trailed at this point in their campaigns — including Trump — but who went on to win.
The president does not officially launch his re-election campaign until Tuesday, at a rally-style event in a huge arena in Orlando, Florida.
CBS News Battleground Tracker poll: Biden leads, with Warren, Harris, Sanders close behind
The belief that he could fare best against President Trump is currently propelling Joe Biden in the early Democratic nomination race by two measures — vote preference, and the delegates that would come with them. But others — including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — are in the mix, at least in terms of the candidates voters are considering.
This study looked at the Democratic contest across the places it will matter first: the entirety of 18 states that will shape the initial 2020 fight through Super Tuesday, including Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. And CBS News converted Democrats’ vote choices across all those states into delegates, because that’s the count that will ultimately matter — that is, the nomination contest selects delegates to the Democratic convention next year.
CBS News first asked which candidates voters are considering supporting — and told them they could pick as many or as few as they liked. (As with many decisions people make, early in the process they’ll narrow their options before settling on one.)