Two National Polls Suggest Three-Way Tie May Be an Outlier

Democratic presidential candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden speaks after exiting th
Joshua Lott/Getty Images
Hannah Knudsen

Two national polls released Wednesday – a Quinnipiac Poll and USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll – show Joe Biden (D) leading the Democrat field and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) overtaking Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and securing a second-place position. The results suggest that Monmouth University’s recent survey, which indicated a three-way tie, may be an outlier.

The Quinnipiac Poll, taken August 21–26, among 648 Democrat voters and Democrat-leaning voters, found Biden leading the pack with 32 percent support, followed by Warren with 19 percent support and Sanders falling to third, with 15 percent support. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) retained her fourth-place position with seven percent support, followed by Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) with five percent support. The only notable change among the lower tier candidates involved Andrew Yang, who is slowly creeping up in the polls, coming behind Buttigieg with three percent support.

The margin of error for the survey is +/- 4.6 percentage points.

Wednesday’s USA TODAY/Suffolk poll – taken August 20-25, among 1,000 registered voters –  told a similar story, showing Biden leading the pack with 32 percent, followed by Warren with 14 percent, and Sanders with 12 percent. The lower tier slightly veered from the Quinnipiac Poll’s findings, showing Buttigieg tying Harris for fourth-place with six percent support. It did, however, show Yang on the rise, with three percent support. The margin of error for the poll is +/- three percent.

The recent polls suggest that Monday’s Monmouth Poll – which showed Biden dropping to third with 19 percent support and Warren and Sanders tying for first place with 20 percent support, indicating a statistical tie, may be an outlier.

According to Monmouth:

Biden has suffered an across the board decline in his support since June.  He lost ground with white Democrats (from 32% to 18%) and voters of color (from 33% to 19%), among voters without a college degree (from 35% to 18%) and college graduates (from 28% to 20%), with both men (from 38% to 24%) and women (from 29% to 16%), and among voters under 50 years old (from 21% to 6%) as well as voters aged 50 and over (from 42% to 33%).  Most of Biden’s lost support in these groups shifted almost equally toward Sanders and Warren.

It does not appear, however, that these newly released polls will assist the presidential hopefuls still vying to get into the next Democrat debate.

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