Republicans have already had two debates, but Democrats are just now getting around to acknowledging that there are more candidates than just Hillary Clinton.
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Although a majority of audiences felt former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the victor of the night, her campaign was unable to gain a major increase in support, according to a new CNN/ORC poll, released Monday.
If Biden declines to run, support for a Clinton nomination will rise to 56 percent against 33 percent for Sanders, according to the poll.
“Certainly we’ve been hearing a lot from the Republican side, they’ve been having spirited debates”, DiCamillo added.
If Biden chooses not to run, the poll finds, most of his support would migrate to Clinton, giving her a 57 percent to 24 percent lead over Sanders, the Vermont senator.
As for Webb and former Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, I kept wondering if they might be ushered off the stage during a commercial break and led to a separate room for their own private undercard debate, the theme of which would be “Why Am I Here?”
The big loser? He’s the man who wasn’t even there: Vice President Joe Biden, who watched the debate from his home at the Naval Observatory, waiting for Hillary Clinton to stumble so badly that Democrats nationwide would beg him to jump into the race in order to save the party. In the same poll, Biden stood at 22 percent.
Sanders surged in the New Hampshire polls throughout the summer, overtaking Clinton by the fall.
All the presidential candidates, from the most flamboyant to the most contained, talked seriously about issues, even straying from liberal orthodoxy. And the same is true of parts of Maryland, where former Gov. Martin O’Malley pushed through tough gun-control laws. But his night was pretty much over when he tried to criticize Clinton’s foreign policy judgment, including her vote in favor of the Iraq invasion. The ratio has now slipped to 47 percent.
What’s more, both Clinton and Sanders saw their overall vote share in the Democratic primary increase after the debate. The debate is being hosted by CNN, and the network has said they will be providing a free live stream on their website. And thank you, Jim Webb, for saying, “No country is a country without defining its borders”.
Clinton was called out on her positions on the Iraq invasion, the deconstruction of Libya, the Patriot Act, the Glass-Steagall Act and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the best she could come up with was that she has the right to change her mind on a few of that after the fact. Biden’s favorable rating is similar among white Democrats (74%) and among black and Hispanic Democrats (72%).
O’Malley made a good point in his opening statement when he said, “We need new leadership”, but the new leadership our country needs exactly the opposite of the progressive agenda he laid out during the debate.
For Democrats, the debate was an opportunity to steal attention from the drama in the Republican primary, where more than a dozen candidates are fighting to overtake billionaire Donald Trump.
The survey’s sampling error is 4.9 percentage points.
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The Monmouth University Poll was conducted by telephone from October 15 to 18, 2015 with 1,012 adults in the United States.
