White House Watch: Sanders Ties Trump, But Is His Dem Support Fading?
President Trump and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders are in a virtual tie in the latest White House Watch hypothetical 2020 matchup, but Democrats don’t seem to be catching the Bern after two rounds of debates.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds Sanders earning 46% support among Likely U.S. Voters to Trump’s 45%. Nine percent (9%) remain undivided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
In early April, Trump held a 47% to 44% lead over Sanders in a one-on-one matchup.
The latest survey finds Trump with 80% of the Republican vote, compared to 83% in the previous Sanders matchup. Sanders gets 75% of the Democratic vote, essentially unchanged from four months ago despite two high-profile candidate debates since then.
Given the large number of candidates entering the race for next year’s Democratic nomination, Rasmussen Reports has opted to run a series of matchups over two-week cycles as the contest continues to develop. These longer cycles mean the matchup findings will be based on 5,000 respondents rather than the usual 1,000 for our regular surveys, and they lower the margin of error. See the results in surveys so far.
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The survey of 5,000 Likely Voters was conducted July 21-25 and July 28-August 1, 2019, 2019 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 1.5 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
Forty-six percent (46%) of all voters think Trump is likely to be reelected in 2020. Thirty-three percent (33%) say he is more likely to be defeated by the Democratic nominee, while just 11% still feel he is likely to be impeached before the end of his first term in office.
Forty-five percent (45%) share a favorable view of Sanders, including 16% with a Very Favorable one. Forty-nine percent (49%) regard him unfavorably, with 33% who hold a Very Unfavorable opinion of the longtime senator who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in 2016.
These findings are unchanged since February when Sanders formally announced his 2020 candidacy.
But among his fellow Democrats, Sanders’ favorables are trending down from a high of 74% in February to 68% now. Just 24% of Democrats have a Very Favorable opinion of Sanders in the latest survey, compared to 35% six months ago.
Those under 40 remain more enthusiastic about Sanders than older voters. Women favor him more than men do.
Half (49%) of Democrats how consider Trump voters to be racist.
Additional information from this survey and a full demographic breakdown are available to Platinum Members only.
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The survey of 5,000 Likely Voters was conducted July 21-25 and July 28-August 1, 2019, 2019 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 1.5 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
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