Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) stellar debate performance last Friday has earned her a much-needed bump in the national polls, putting her at second, now, behind Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and, for the first time, ahead of former Vice President Joe Biden, who is in third.
The CBS/YouGov national poll, released Monday, shows Warren at 19%, trailing Sanders, who is at 28%, by nine points. More importantly, though, she’s now passed Joe Biden, who was once leading the field, by two points — still in the margin of error, but notable nonetheless.
Axios reports that 50% of Warren’s backers returned to supporting the Massachusetts Senator after her debate performance in Nevada, last Friday, where she took aim directly at former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, torching him over allegations that he forced female employees to sign non-disclosure agreements, asking whether, if they were free to talk, those same female employees might accuse Bloomberg of having created a difficult work environment or engaged in sexual harassment — two rumors about Bloomberg that have swirled since his time in office in NYC.
Warren, deploying her seldom-seen quick wit, accused Bloomberg of calling women ‘fat broads” and “horsed-faced lesbians.” It later turned out that both of those pejoratives originated in a book of jokes Bloomberg authored some years ago, and both made reference to members of the British royal family, not his female colleagues.
But Warren had definitely struck a blow. On Saturday, her campaign released a statement claiming that she’d raised an astounding $14 million in the week following the New Hampshire primary, and that she’d raked in $2.8 million on Wednesday, the night of the debate itself, easily making it her best fundraising day ever, per Vox.
“Within hours, Warren’s campaign announced they had raised more than $2.8 million on Wednesday, their best debate fundraising day of the campaign to date,” the outlet reported late last week. “During the debate, one of her staffers tweeted that the campaign had raised $425,000 in just 30 minutes. This is very good news for the Warren campaign, given that her fourth quarter fundraising numbers had fallen behind the Q4 hauls of many of her main competitors last year.”
Over the weekend, Warren touted her momentum on the trail, telling a Seattle crowd that she felt that things were moving in the right direction, even though Warren placed a dismal fourth in the Nevada caucuses, earning just 1,300 votes across the state. She came away without a share of the state’s delegates.
Warren is clearly hoping to stay in the race through Super Tuesday, in part because things are looking up (at least slighly) but also, perhaps, in part to deny Sanders an outright victory in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. If Sanders doesn’t end up with a large share of the delegates at play on March 3rd, under the rules of the Democratic National Convention, he cannot win the nomination outright on the convention’s first vote (a candidate needs a “clear majority” of delegates). That could make the DNC a “brokered convention,” handing the eventual nomination to nearly anyone still in the field.
Warren has clearly targeted Bloomberg, sensing, as many Democrats do, that he’s building support for a guerilla bid for the nomination at the convention.
The next Democratic contest is February 29th in South Carolina. Joe Biden is, currently, expected to win.