Sanders, Warren receive boosts in Iowa, but new national poll still pegs Biden as favorite

Saturday turned out to be a pretty good day for three of the leading Democratic presidential candidates.

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) both received big news out of Iowa, which is gearing up for the Democratic caucus in just over a week. Sanders led relatively comfortably in the latest state poll from The New York Times and Siena College, while Warren picked up a key endorsement from Iowa's most significant newspaper, The Des Moines Register, which praised her economic acumen and decried people who label her as a radical.

But beyond Iowa, former Vice President Joe Biden still looked like the favorite, at least when it comes to a new national poll released late Saturday evening by The Washington Post and ABC News. Biden was holding on to a nine point lead over Sanders with Warren checking in at a distant third. The vice president was also seen as the most likely candidate to defeat President Trump head-to-head by a significant 20-point margin over Sanders.

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The Post-ABC poll was conducted by telephone from Monday through Thursday among a random national sample of 388 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. The margin of error is 6 percentage points. Read more at The Washington Post.