Vice President Joe Biden spoke in the Rose Gardens of the White House October 21 where he confirmed that he “will not be a candidate” for the 2016 Presidential election. However, Biden affirmed that he “will not be silent” in the upcoming 15 months of election season.
A NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percent, 38 percent of Democrats would prefer Biden to sit out the Presidential Race. Thirty percent showed support for a Biden bid, leaving 31 percent of respondents with no opinion either way.
A Biden bid has impacted the Democratic Party campaigns, even as just a possibility. Polling data from the Pew Research Center, Fox News, CBS, NBC/WSJ and many other news organizations have included Biden as a candidate for previous polls. Biden has garnered 25 percent or more of those polled, with the RCP average of 16.8 percent.
Hillary Clinton leads 47.8 percent RCP average to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders 25.7 average to earn the Democratic nomination. With Biden out of the race, poll results may give a better idea of just who the Democratic frontrunner will be.
Clinton and Sanders continue to make headlines along the presidential trail. After the first Democratic Debate, social media buzzed over the apparent deletion of a CNN poll showing Sanders leading by large margins on “Who won the debate.”
The claim made rounds through Facebook, speculating that Clinton’s campaign donation ties to CNN parent company Time Warner nixed the poll to present Clinton as the victor.
The claim, however, was discovered to been unsubstantial. CNN did not delete the poll, the poll is still available—although it is closed now—via Cnn.com/vote, where CNN used a Facebook app to provide a non-scientific, interactive live poll of users to express their opinions on the Democratic Debate.
Biden may have expressed similar sentiments towards Clinton’s history of wealth and power in her position during his speech where he remarked: “The middle class will never have a fighting chance in this country as long as just several hundred families, the wealthiest families, control the process.”
Whereas Sanders deflected criticism of the Federal investigations of Clinton on what has become known as the “Email Scandal,” Republicans and Democrats alike have not been as disconcerted.
Clinton responded to the debate question of whom she was most proud to have made an enemy of with, “In addition to the NRA, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the Iranians — probably the Republicans.”
This comes as a surprise to health insurance companies and drug companies as the Clinton campaign has received upwards of multiple millions of dollars in donations since 2008.
Biden responded during his speech, calling for the end of “this notion that the enemy is the other party.”
“If you treat it as an enemy, there is no way you can ever resolve the problems that we have,” Biden said. “I don’t think my chief enemy is the Republican Party. This is a matter of making things work,” Biden said.
The Democratic Presidential candidates will square off next on November 14 in Des Moines, Iowa.
Barton Kleen
Managing Editor