A new book just revealed how Biden’s polling is politically stronger than reported
Meet the Candidates 2020 reveals how current polling shows that Joe Biden is set to win a majority of the delegates and the nomination in a landslide if the primary were held today.
Skyhorse Publishing ‘s latest title in the Meet the Candidates 2020 series, Meet the Candidates 2020: Joe Biden, explains how candidates drawing less than 15% of the votes do not earn convention delegates towards the nomination after the early states, and how that gives the former Vice President a stronger path to the nomination than previously reported.
A new poll from Fox News just indicated that Biden’s support has bounced back to pre-debate levels.
“Joe Biden’s long track record to defend is also a strong political brand,” says Grant Stern. “But his polling numbers are actually stronger than is being widely reported, because Democratic primary rules only award delegates to candidates who win more than 15% of the vote. He’ll win if he stays the course.”
As Politico’s Zach Montellaro wrote in his column entitled ‘Biden Bounces Back’:
“A new Fox News survey shows the former vice president at pre-debate levels, with more than double the support of the second-place candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders.”
“This puts the Democratic primary election’s math heavily in the vice president’s favor,” says Scott Dworkin. “There are three progressive candidates with a voting bloc larger than Biden’s base, but will one yield?”
Stern and Dworkin’s Meet the Candidates 2020 series is the informed voter’s guide to making a decision in the 2020 Democratic primary and presidential election. In two hours of reading, you’ll understand their defining characteristics, credentials, campaign issues, challenges, presidential chances, and everything else you need to know about who is challenging Donald Trump, whether it’s for Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, or Cory Booker.
Each book gives an unbiased, political insider’s analysis of each contender, featuring: candidate interviews; an introduction by campaign adviser, Democratic Coalition co-founder, and Dworkin Report host Scott Dworkin; and compilation and writing by Grant Stern, who is an Editor at Large for Occupy Democrats and also an investigative journalist for DCReport.org.
Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 9 which explains why Joe Biden benefits from Democratic Party rules:
[Biden] stands to benefit the most from the Democratic primary’s proportional representation system, which only gives delegates to candidates who win more than fifteen percent of the vote, because amongst all candidates, he’s the only one who stands above that number across most polls in most states in the early-going of the campaign.
“I don’t think the major argument about Donald Trump in 2020 is going to be his personal offenses against women. I think it’s going to be his policy offenses against women, his agenda and how, as we see now in the abortion bills rippling through the South and the Midwest, he has made the lives of women worse,” says the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin. “I absolutely think it could come down to a Biden/Warren face-off.”
In 2018, the Democratic National Committee voted to strip superdelegates of their power to cast a ballot in the presidential nomination during the first round of balloting, which turns the party primary into the true decider of the race.
If the former Vice President maintains his current polling position, that rule will ensure his nomination. Real Clear Politics tracks major national polls, and only four polls out of seventeen post-debate surveys have reflected more than one challenger with fifteen percent support, or greater.
In a two way race, even the closest polling between Biden and another candidate, Senator Harris, shows that he would win 52% of the vote by getting 22% of the vote to her 20% which is 52.3% of the delegate count.
However, a look at the math above shows how Biden has a great chance of earning a plurality because the primary rules would award him 40% of the votes in a three-way or four-way race. His advantage only grows with more candidates in the field, if he maintains his current support.
The race is, of course, decided at the state level, state by state, not by the national polling, however, those polls are reflective of the divided early primary electorate and lack of a clear second and third choice in the field of twenty-four Democrats.
Set aside New Hampshire and Iowa, who do not use proportional delegates and are small states considered more important as indicator races than for their delegate counts.
The most recent Nevada polling from FiveThirtyEight shows Biden winning anywhere from 53% to 65% of the proportional delegate count.
Monmouth University’s first poll of South Carolina came out yesterday, showing that Biden has a whopping 51% support level amongst African-American voters, and 39% overall without any other challenger gaining more than 15% of the survey, with 17% of voters undecided.
Vice President Biden does not have the nomination sewn up already at the outset of the ongoing 2020 Democratic primary, just because he is the early front runner.
Primaries are marathons, not sprints, and next week is the second of what will be a total of twelve primary debates. It’s also the last time we will see twenty candidates on stage over two nights.
However, whoever does win the Democratic nomination, will ultimately need to win the primaries and caucuses with Biden’s current level of support to win the proportional delegate count, and gather the first-ballot majority of delegates at next year’s Democratic National Convention to seal their candidacy for President of the United States.
Find out more in Meet the Candidates 2020: Joe Biden which is online, and on your local bookstore shelves at Barnes and Noble today.
