More than one-third of registered voters — including 43% of Democrats — think former Vice President Joe Biden will claim the Democratic nomination, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov survey.
Just 19% of registered voters and 17% of Democrats think Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will claim the right to challenge President Donald Trump in November. Seven percent of registered voters and 13% of Democrats think Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren will, while 5% of registered voters and 7% of Democrats think former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will claim his new party’s nomination. No other candidate received more than 2%, including former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
A major portion of the electorate is unsure who will win: 27% of registered voters and 14% of Democrats didn’t have an opinion about who would clinch the nomination.
The survey illustrates how Biden, the leading establishment candidate in the race, is still considered the default pick for many Democrats — even after taking fire for months from other candidates, including Sanders.
The 43% of Democrats who say they think Biden will eventually face Trump greatly outpaces his performance in polling averages, which generally show him receiving around 27% of the vote. That means a significant amount of voters who intend to cast ballots for candidates other than Biden think he’ll still claim the nomination.
At the same time, Sanders generally receives around 22% support in polling averages ― meaning many of his supporters think another candidate will ultimately triumph. The same is true of backers of Warren, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and entrepreneur Andrew Yang.
Yet the results also indicate that many voters believe the candidate they are backing is likely to win: Black voters, who make up a core part of Biden’s base, are especially confident he will win the nomination, with 44% predicting a victory. Just 10% think Sanders will win, while 9% think Warren will and 8% say the same of Bloomberg.
But among Hispanic voters, who Sanders has courted extensively, just 25% think Biden will win, while 22% see Sanders becoming the nominee.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Jan. 28-29 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
HuffPost has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some but not all potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.
Ariel Edwards-Levy contributed reporting.