A new poll conducted by UMass Amherst and local ABC affiliate, WCVB, is putting former Vice President Joe Biden ahead of the Democratic pack among African American voters in Super Tuesday states.
The UMass/WCVB poll, according to the news outlet, polled 500 registered (likely) Democratic Black voters living in the 14 states that will head to the polls on Tuesday, March 3. What they concluded is Biden will walk away with the majority of the votes. Of those queried, 33 percent would back Biden, 23 percent would vote for Sen. Sanders, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren would round out the top candidates with 15 percent and 14 percent, respectively.
Biden received the majority of support from a number of subsections of the polled voters, including Black men and Black women across all education and income levels. The group that he hasn’t seem to have won over is the 18-29 age group, who chose Sen. Bernie Sanders as their preferred candidate. The current frontrunner also came in as the top alternative candidate when respondents were asked to indicate who they would pick if their preferred candidate was excluded from the list.
When it comes to beating Donald Trump in the 2020 general election, the Black voters surveyed believe that Biden (28 percent), Sanders (23 percent), and Bloomberg (22 percent) are the most likely to do it. UMass/WCVB poll respondents say that defeating Trump is the most important quality that a candidate can have.
Among the low performers in this poll were former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, billionaire businessman Tom Steyer, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. The latter received zero percent of the vote and ranked at the bottom for nearly every category.
Registered voters in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia head to the polls on Tuesday.