Joe Biden is still considered the most likely candidate to beat Trump in a new poll, but Elizabeth Warren is inching closer


Voters are finding it ever more likely that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has a good shot at unseating President Trump if she wins the Democratic nomination, a new Economist/YouGov poll shows.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has been running on the notion that he'd be able to swing middle-of-the-road voters in middle-of-the-road states back to the blue side after their dalliance with the GOP in 2016, making him the candidate with the best "electability" claim. But Warren is gaining on him. A healthy 65 percent of Democratic voters polled still said that Biden would "probably beat Donald Trump" in the general election, while Warren received the second highest mark in that area, with 57 percent.
Sure, those eight percentage points don't make for an insignificant gap, but Warren has vaulted 14 points since a previous poll in June, while Biden's figure has stagnated. And the two actually drew even closer among those who say each candidate would "probably lose" to Trump, with 16 percent of Democratic voters feeling pessimistic about Biden's chances and 18 percent for Warren.
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Faiz Shakir, the campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said that Biden's case "rests on some weak assumptions," anyway. "You have to excite people about where you want to take this country," he said. Bloomberg notes that candidates like Sanders and Warren, for example, are focused more on bringing in new votes from people who sat out the 2016 election because of disenchantment, in contrast to Biden's determination to flip voters. That said, Biden still has more than his fair share of believers.
"We can't take a chance, and Joe Biden is our best chance," Henry Singleton, a New Yorker who watched the major Democratic candidates make their pitch to black voters at the NAACP convention in Detroit last month, told Bloomberg.
The Economist/YouGov poll was conducted between August 10-13 through web-based interviews with 1,500 U.S. adult citizens. The margin of error was 3 percentage points.
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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.
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