Three days before the Iowa caucuses, Bernie Sanders has taken the lead in one major national poll for the first time.
Sanders topped the Democratic presidential field with 27 percent, followed by Joe Biden at 26 percent, in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey released Friday.
NBC News reports: 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. The new survey marks a six-point gain for Sanders since last month. … The two co-frontrunners’ coalitions continue to split Democratic voters along sharp racial and generational lines, and the supporters backing each of them have starkly different views of capitalism and socialism.
Meanwhile, former Maryland Congressman John Delaney has ended his presidential campaign, leaving 11 Democrats in the race.
Vox reports: Delaney, who was the first notable Democratic candidate to enter the race, announced his dropout Friday — over two years after he first launched his campaign. It’s a bitter end for a candidate that made the ambitious decision to step away from Congress in 2018 to move full-time to Iowa, the first caucus state. Despite that move, he struggled to poll above 1 percent nationally or in the state, and hadn’t made it onto a debate stage since July.
