Warren Passes Biden, Takes the Lead in Prized Iowa Poll

DES MOINES (The Washington Post) —

Sen. Elizabeth Warren surged to first place in a respected poll of likely Iowa caucusgoers released on Saturday.

The poll is the first from the Des Moines Register, together with CNN and Mediacom, to put the two-term Massachusetts Democrat in the lead, at 22 percent. Former vice president Joe Biden, who led the Register’s June poll, fell by 3 percentage points to a close 20 percent. And Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., slipped 5 percentage points to a distant third, at 11 percent.

The poll was conducted Sept. 14-18 among 602 probable caucusgoers in the first-in-the-nation contest, which will take place in February. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Filling out the top five were Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind., and Sen. Kamala Harris of California. Buttigieg, whose campaign had a commanding presence at Saturday’s Polk County Steak Fry, fell by 6 percentage points from the June poll.

The summer poll, which put Warren at only 15 percent, differed from the poll whose results were released Saturday in seeking to take into account Iowa’s plan for a so-called “virtual caucus,” which has since been scrapped because of concerns about whether phone technology could be secured against hacking. A Monmouth University poll released last month suggested that the addition of an option to participate over the phone, rather than attending an hours-long meeting in the biting cold, would have expanded support for Biden.

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