At least before former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg was eviscerated on stage Wednesday night in Nevada, he was in second place among North Carolina’s likely Democratic primary voters with early voting underway.
Senator Bernie Sanders is atop the field, with 23 percent support, followed by Bloomberg (19 percent), Joe Biden (16 percent), Elizabeth Warren (14 percent), Pete Buttigieg (10 percent), and Amy Klobuchar (7 percent), according to a survey by the University of Massachusetts Lowell released today.
The poll was in the field from February 12–18, meaning people were surveyed from last Wednesday until Tuesday—before Bloomberg’s difficult Democratic debate.
Those results mostly align with other recent surveys. A Survey USA poll had Bloomberg and Sanders tied at 22 percent with Biden at 20. A High Point University poll from earlier this month had Sanders leading Biden by six points among registered voters, and Bloomberg six points behind Biden.
Earlier this week, Bloomberg was endorsed by Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin and former mayors Nancy McFarlane and Charles Meeker; he’d already been endorsed by Charlotte Mayor Vy Lyles. But he’s also been battered by unearthed footage of him saying that black and Latino men can’t “behave” in the workplace and revelations that he referred to transgender women as “some guy wearing a dress.”
That proved to be fodder for Warren and Bloomberg’s other opponents, who took him to task for his racist and transphobic comments and pressed him to release former employees from nondisclosure agreements.
“None of them accused me of doing anything other than maybe they didn’t like a joke I told,” Bloomberg said in his defense.
Warren wasn’t having it: “We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many nondisclosure agreements and the drip drip drip of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against,” Warren said. “That’s not what we do as Democrats.”
UMass also polled Minnesota, where home-state senator Klobuchar is up on Sanders by six (and Bloomberg is a non-factor); and Texas, where Sanders is three points ahead of Biden, who is ahead of Bloomberg by two.
Contact Raleigh news editor Leigh Tauss at [email protected].
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