Poll: Biden holds 11-point lead among registered voters following debate

Former Vice President Joe Biden maintains his lead among 2020 Democrats vying for the party’s nomination, despite getting rocky reviews for his performance in the first round of primary debates last week, a new Washington Post-ABC News survey finds.

When given a list of 22 Democrats pursuing the primary nomination and asked to say the name of one they’d support right now, 30 percent of registered voters who identified as Democratic or Democratic-leaning said they would choose Biden.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) finished second with 19 percent, while Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) received 13 percent and 12 percent, respectively.

{mosads}No other candidate received more than 5 percent of the vote. 

Previous Washington Post-ABC News polls had only asked respondents to name their choice without a list of candidates.

When asked to name their candidate without the list of names, Biden led with 28 percent of the vote, up 11 points from the same poll in April. Sanders followed at 16 percent, with Harris coming in third at 11 percent.

The poll shows Biden with a more comfortable margin than a CNN poll and a Quinnipiac University poll released earlier this week. The CNN poll showed Harris jumping to second place in the field with 17 percent of the vote, trailing Biden by just 5 points, while the Quinnipiac poll showed a larger surge for Harris to 20 percent, just 2 points behind the former vice president.

While Biden still carries the status of front-runner, registered voters said Harris was the standout among the 20 candidates who took the stage for the first Democratic debates last Wednesday and Thursday in Miami.

Forty-one percent in the Washington Post-ABC News poll said Harris had done an “especially good job” during the debate, with Warren taking the second spot at 26 percent. Biden comes in third at 21 percent, the survey finds.

Harris went at Biden at Thursday night’s debate, saying remarks he made about working with segregationist senators were “hurtful,” while also targeting Biden’s record of being opposed to busing black students to majority white schools, noting that she personally benefited from such busing.

The survey interviewed 1,008 adults, including 460 Democrats and 397 Democratic-leaning independent voters, and was conducted between June 28-July 1. The margin of error is 1.4 percentage points.