New Morning Consult poll shows Bernie with a 10-point lead over Biden nationally

Whoever it is at the DNC who has the job of making sure Bernie doesn’t win the nomination is doing a lousy job:

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has opened up a double-digit lead over his next closest rivals in a new national survey.

The latest Morning Consult poll finds Sanders at 29 percent support, followed by former Vice President Joe Biden at 19 percent and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg at 18 percent. Sanders gained 3 points in the poll after winning the New Hampshire primary this week, while Biden lost 3 points after a disastrous fifth-place showing.

Bernie’s support at 29 percent reflects a few things. One is the fact that there’s a definite ceiling within the Democratic Party of people who are willing to nominate and out-and-out socialist. That doesn’t mean other Democrat candidates don’t agree with socialist ideas. For the most part, they do. But there seems to be a division between the group that loves Bernie so much that they simply want him nominated no matter what, and those who fear Trump will wipe them out if they put a guy at the top of the ticket who went to the Soviet Union for his honeymoon.

At the same time, it’s clear there is no alternative who is gaining so much traction that Bernie-nervous Democrats are coalescing around him or her. Bloomberg’s rise reflects what he’s been spending on television ads, while Biden’s fall reflects that fact that the man lost his flipping mind decades ago and people are just now realizing it.

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For all the positive press Boot Edge Edge is getting, he remains the 39-year-old former mayor of a small city, and his record in that job is not very impressive. Just because you can sound like the white Obama in your speeches doesn’t mean you’d make a good president.

Amy Klubochar might become the media’s flavor of the week after her surprising third-place finish in New Hampshire, and I actually think she would be the most formidable opponent for Trump simply because she doesn’t come across quite as insane as the other Democrats. But she essentially supports the same left-wing policies as the rest of them to varying degrees.

Early in the 2016 race, Trump was consistently running at or above 30 percent while the other contenders fought for the scraps, and Trump skeptics (of which I was one) expressed hope that one of them would consolidate the anti-Trump vote and take over the race. That never happened because Trump’s fans were committed, and everyone else seemed to see the remaining choices as six of one and a half-dozen of the other.

Eventually Trump picked up enough wins that it became impossible to stop him.

Bernie could have a similar path to the Democrat nomination this year. It’s not that there’s a massive majority of Democrats who want to nominate him. It’s just that no one else’s fans are as committed to their candidate as his are to him – and honestly, they really don’t provide much reason to be.

Supposedly Biden still polls strongly in the upcoming South Carolina primary, and that could provide the sort of momentum change that could turn his fortunes around. Don’t forget, there was a point in the 2008 primary race when John McCain looked absolutely finished, but he rallied and won the nomination.

It’s not impossible that Biden could do the same, especially if the party apparatus rallies behind him. But actual voters don’t seem to have much enthusiasm for him, and it’s hard to see why they should.

I still find it hard to believe the Democrats would nominate a socialist and risk a 40-state wipeout, but I shouldn’t underestimate the ability of the Democratic Party to do the absolute stupidest thing imaginable.