A new poll of Iowa Democrats shows former secretary of state Hillary Clinton taking a dramatic lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the nation’s first presidential caucus state.
According to the Monmouth University Polling Institute, 65 percent of likely caucus-goers support Clinton, while just 24 percent back Sanders. That 41-point spread is far wider than the single-digit leads Clinton has held in many other recent polls.
“We now have a two-person race, but one of those competitors has just pulled very far ahead,” says Patrick Murray, who runs the Monmouth institute and conducted the poll.
So what accounts for Clinton’s surge? The Monmouth poll is among the first conducted after Vice President Joe Biden announced last Wednesday that he’d sit out the 2016 presidential race — and it was almost entirely conducted after Clinton performed well in front of a U.S. House committee hearing on the Benghazi attacks.
But the New York Times‘s Nate Cohn has another explanation: The poll is flawed.
Cohn points out that Monmouth surveyed only registered Democrats who took part in either Iowa’s 2012 or 2014 caucuses:
These two conditions — being a registered Democrat and recent primary participation — exclude many of Mr. Sanders’s supporters. He fares best among unaffiliated voters in most polls, and thousands of them will participate in the Iowa caucuses.
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Not only do state primaries draw an older electorate than a presidential primary, but the 2012 and 2014 Democratic primaries also had particularly low turnout, with just 58,000 and 72,000 voters. The 18-to-24-year-old voters represented 17 percent of the electorate in the 2008 Democratic caucuses, according to the entrance polls, but were just 2.6 percent of the electorate in the most recent contest.
Younger voters, Cohn notes, favored Sanders 3 to 1 in a recent Quinnipiac University poll, while the senator’s senior-citizen contemporaries were far more likely to support Clinton.
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so flawed why are you posting this Paul Heintz…Bernie must have really burned you at some time..I challenge you to post something positive about Bernie…just something..
1. If the poll is accurate Hillary needs to thank Bernie because most of her positions were formed after Bernie entered the race and raised them as issues.
2. Paul doesn’t so much write as he collects information from other outlets. He’s expected to be mouthy because people loved that so much in Peter Freyne. Otherwise, there would be no reason to read him.
Now that the gloves are coming off, maybe voters are taking a hard look at what Bernie’s proposals will actually cost. Art Woolf had a good article on the Democratic Socialism costs in Denmark from October 21 and it shows how everybody has to pay a lot more. It gives a much better view of how it was accomplished and how Bernie’s Mantra of taxing just the rich to pay for his programs will bankrupt the country. He also fails to acknowledge the history of the country that shows, government programs never led the US out of unemployment or to better economic conditions, it was the private sector’s growth