A new national poll of Democratic primary voters helps illustrate why Mr. Sanders is so eager to pick a fight with Mr. Biden: The former vice president has gained ground since entering the race and enjoys the support of 39 percent of his party’s voters while Mr. Sanders is in second place with 15 percent. [Check out the Democratic field with our candidate tracker.] There are other reasons that Mr. Sanders is trying to frame the race in one-on-one terms. The same poll showed that Mr. Biden, a mainstream progressive, also enjoys a wide lead right now with liberals, with 32 percent compared with Mr. Sanders’s 19 percent. While the two men are seen by political insiders as hailing from starkly different wings of the party, here in Iowa, there is considerable overlap in their early bases of support. A Des Moines Register-CNN survey last month of likely Iowa Democratic caucusgoers indicated that Mr. Biden had an overall advantage over Mr. Sanders within the margin of error, but more revealing is that their supporters named the other man as their preferred second choice. That’s partly the result of their being the two best-known candidates at this early stage of the race. But the 2016 presidential primary, in both parties, demonstrated that assumptions about voters falling along expected ideological lines can be mistaken. Longtime Iowa Democrats, however, note that there is another precedent that Mr. Sanders must be mindful of: The candidate who goes on the attack in the state is often not the one who reaps the benefit when the candidate being attacked drops in the polls. “You’ve got to be careful because we don’t like that,” said Dave Nagle, a former Iowa Democratic chairman. He recalled how Richard A. Gephardt’s attacks on Howard Dean, the front-runner in the 2004 race, only helped John Kerry complete his stunning comeback. “I don’t think it’s helpful for the senator from Vermont to go after a combatant from the same army at this point,” Mr. Nagle said, referring to Mr. Sanders. As for Mr. Biden, the only Democrat he is eager to discuss at the moment is the one who made him vice president.<doc-sep>Former Vice President Joe Biden Joe BidenAmerican held in Russia contracts COVID-19 after denied vaccine Biden defends waiving sanctions against Nord Stream Senators struggle to save Jan. 6 commission MORE has surged in the polls since launching his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, opening up a double-digit lead over the rest of the field in two new national surveys. A CNN poll released Tuesday found Biden jumping 11 points to 39 percent support, a 24-point lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernie SandersSenate competitiveness bill includes B authorization for Bezos space company Sanders wants government to get 'piece' of US semiconductor companies in exchange for aid Poll: 51 percent oppose Sanders-led resolution to block weapons sales to Israel MORE (I-Vt.), who is at 15 percent support. No other candidate in the race has double-digit backing from respondents. ADVERTISEMENT And a Morning Consult survey released Tuesday found Biden with 36 percent support, followed by Sanders at 22 percent. That’s a 6-point bounce for Biden from the same survey released earlier this month, while Sanders has fallen by 2 points. No other candidate reaches double-digit support in the Morning Consult poll, either. Biden’s polling strength also extends to the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire. A Suffolk University survey released Tuesday found the former Delaware senator in the lead in New Hampshire with 20 percent support, followed by Sanders and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg Pete ButtigiegThe Hill's Morning Report - Presented by Uber - One year later — has George Floyd's killing changed the world? Bipartisan infrastructure talks on life support Buttigieg acknowledges 'daylight' between White House, GOP on infrastructure MORE at 12 percent. Sen. Elizabeth Warren Elizabeth WarrenOn The Money: Biden administration launches trade dispute against Canadian dairy industry | Warren urges Biden to replace Fed's Quarles Warren urges Biden to replace Fed's Quarles in testy exchange Warren offers bill to increase IRS budget to .5 billion MORE (D-Mass.) is in fourth place at 8 percent. If Biden were to win New Hampshire it would be a massive blow to Sanders and Warren, who come from nearby states and are seen as having a home-field advantage in the Northeast. Biden’s strength in the polls is driven by his broad support from African Americans. Biden has 43 percent support from black voters, according to Morning Consult. Sanders is at 20 percent here, followed by Sen. Kamala Harris Kamala HarrisBiden, Bass press for police reform after meeting Floyd family Biden, Harris condemn surge in antisemitic incidents Mexican president: FAA safety downgrade meant to benefit US carriers MORE (D-Calif.) at 10 percent. The same holds true in the CNN poll, with Biden hitting 50 percent among nonwhite voters. Sanders is a distant second at 14 percent, and no other candidate is in double-digits. With Biden emerging as the clear early front-runner, the Democrats lagging behind are increasingly taking shots at him and his decades-long voting record. Sanders went after Biden with his most direct attacks yet on Monday night on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.” "I helped lead the fight against NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement], [Biden] voted for NAFTA. I helped lead the fight against China [on trade], he voted for it. I strongly opposed [the Trans-Pacific Partnership], he supported it. I voted against the war in Iraq, he voted for it,” Sanders said. President Trump Donald TrumpTrump lashes out after grand jury seated for New York criminal probe Schumer tees up vote on Jan. 6 commission bill Senators struggle to save Jan. 6 commission MORE also unloaded on Biden with a series of Twitter attacks, suggesting the president and his political team view the former vice president as a formidable challenger. The attacks from the White House further help Biden separate himself from the pack of Democrats behind him, setting up an early one-on-one with the president that sets Biden above the fray. Biden has sought to draw early contrasts between himself and Trump, opening his launch speech by attacking the president’s response to the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. On Monday, Biden rallied union workers at a campaign event in Pennsylvania, a state Trump turned red in the last election for the first time since 1988. “I'm sick of this President badmouthing unions,” Biden tweeted. “Labor built the middle class in this country … we need a president who honors them and their work.”<doc-sep>It was a telling moment for newly declared Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Speaking with reporters on the campaign trail in Monticello, Iowa, the former vice president was asked Tuesday about some jabs from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a top rival for the Democratic nomination. BIDEN TAKES AIM AT TRUMP OVER CHARLOTTESVILLE COMMENTS Biden – the front-runner for the 2020 nomination race in just about every national and early-voting state poll – didn’t engage. “We got plenty of time to respond, I’m not going to get in a debate with my colleagues here,” Biden said. Rather than respond to attacks from his numerous primary rivals, Biden right now is running a general election-style campaign, keeping his focus almost entirely on Republican President Trump. Presumably, this is by design. “I think his strategy makes sense right now. And it’s a strategy I’m not sure very many other people could pull off because he’s so well known by the electorate,” explained Mo Elleithee, the founding executive director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service and a Fox News contributor. BIDEN TOPS SANDERS, O'ROURKE FOR LARGEST FIRST 24 HOUR FUNDRAISING HAUL Elleithee, a senior spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign who later served as communications director for the Democratic National Committee, emphasized that Biden “doesn’t need to spend the same amount of time as some of the other candidates do in introducing himself. He can go straight to drawing the contrast between two very different visions of America.” That’s what the former vice president is doing, as he essentially ignores at this point the other candidates in an extremely large Democratic field that’s reached 20 contenders. In his video last week launching his White House bid, Biden pointed to the violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017 at a white nationalist rally and took aim at the president’s response at the time that there were “people that were very fine people on both sides." BIDEN SNAGS FIRST MAJOR UNION ENDORSEMENT IN 2020 RACE The former vice president charged in his video that “with those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it." Biden spotlighted Charlottesville again on Monday in Pittsburgh, as he hit the campaign trail for the first time as a 2020 presidential contender. And Tuesday, speaking to a crowd in Cedar Rapids, Biden warned of the dangers of re-electing Trump. “You all know in your gut that this election for president is different,” Biden stressed. “Limited to four years, this administration will go down as an aberrant moment in time. But give eight years to this administration and the White House and we’re going to forever and fundamentally change the character of the country.” Trump has been drawn into the fray as well, firing back at Biden on Twitter and blasting a major firefighters union for endorsing him. Elleithee explained that it benefits Biden “to be able to jump ahead – at least at this stage – and show that he can make a compelling case to the country on why his vision is better than the president’s.” He added, “While much of his message is focused on Trump, what it’s doing is drawing a contrast between Trump’s angry vision versus his hopeful vision, appealing to our better angles.” “It’s no mistake that of the three pillars of his campaign, Biden led with ‘the battle for the soul of this nation,’” Elleithee noted. “It’s a double message – one for a general election electorate but very much for a Democratic electorate as well.” Hours after he launched his campaign, Biden immediately took incoming fire from both Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, another populist Democratic contender promoting progressive proposals. Warren contrasted her longtime record of taking on Wall Street with that of Biden, reigniting a nearly two-decades-old fight between the two over the country’s bankruptcy laws. “At a time when the biggest financial institutions in this country were trying to put the squeeze on millions of hard-working families who were in bankruptcy because of medical problems, job losses, divorce and death in the family, there was nobody to stand up for them,” Warren said while campaigning in Iowa. “I got in that fight because they just didn't have anyone," she said. "And Joe Biden was on the side of the credit card companies.” That night -- as the former vice president spent his first evening as a 2020 candidate raising campaign cash at the suburban Philadelphia home of David Cohen, a senior executive of the Comcast Corp. and a former Democratic operative -- the Sanders’ campaign criticized Biden. In a fundraising email to supporters, Sanders’ campaign manager Faiz Shakir wrote that “it's a big day in the Democratic primary and we're hoping to end it strong. Not with a fundraiser in the home of a corporate lobbyist, but with an overwhelming number of individual donations in response to today's news.” Neither Biden nor his campaign reacted to either of the jabs. Sanders – Biden’s main rival at this early stage in the election cycle – on Monday contrasted his record with the former vice president's. "I helped lead the fight against [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. He voted for NAFTA," Sanders said during an interview on CNN. "I helped lead the fight against [permanent normal trade relations] with China. He voted for it. I strongly opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He supported it. I voted against the war in Iraq. He voted for it." Asked about those comments, Biden didn’t respond to Sanders’ criticism. But he did defend his NAFTA vote in the Senate a quarter century ago, saying “it wasn’t” a mistake. Biden added that he wasn’t alarmed about running against a 20-person field. And he said that he would engage his rivals for the nomination when the primary debates get underway at the end of June. The snipes by Sanders and Warren offer a preview of attacks likely to come during those monthly debates. Sanders and Warren – and others in the field – represent the progressive wing of a party that’s moved to the left in recent years. Biden, who calls himself an ‘Obama-Biden Democrat,’ is viewed as the more moderate, party establishment candidate. Despite their obvious differences, both Biden and Sanders are battling for many of the same people – the working-class voters in the Rust Belt states that abandoned the Democrats in 2016 and helped put Trump in the White House. Elleithee said that Biden doesn’t need to engage with his primary rivals right now. “There’s a time during the debates when he’ll be able to respond to the jabs coming at him,” he noted. “Right now he’s still laying out the rationale for his case and it’s pretty clear that he wants to [go] bigger than focusing on the direction of the party, he wants to focus on the direction of the country.”<doc-sep>
(CNN) — Sen. Bernie Sanders compared his record with Joe Biden’s on trade and foreign policy on Monday, attempting to draw sharp contrasts between himself and the former vice president as the two lead the Democratic presidential pack. When asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper if Sanders was concerned about Biden’s endorsement from the International Association of Fire Fighters, the Vermont independent said, “I’m running against, I think, 19 other people, so I’m concerned about everybody,” with a laugh – before setting out a brief history of their political disagreements. “But I think when people take a look at my record versus Vice President Biden’s record – I helped lead the fight against (North American Free Trade Agreement); he voted for NAFTA,” Sanders said on “Anderson Cooper 360.” “I helped lead the fight against (permanent normal trade relations) with China; he voted for it. I strongly opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership; he supported it. I voted against the war in Iraq; he voted for it.” Sanders’ comments offered a preview of the debates likely to dominate the Democratic primary, as the party’s recent progressive push comes up against its more corporate-friendly, moderate establishment. Biden and Sanders, despite their differences on policy, both see electoral bases of support in the industrial Midwest and among organized labor. By underlining his opposition to trade deals mostly reviled by leading unions, Sanders, who has also criticized President Donald Trump’s record on this front, could cut into Biden’s support. Biden, during his time serving under President Barack Obama, was one of the leading backers of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive proposed trade deal that Trump snuffed out early in his term. Sanders greeted its demise with delight, saying in a January 2017 statement that he was “glad the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead and gone.” But Sanders has also clashed with the President repeatedly over trade policy, most recently when he came out in opposition to the administration’s renegotiation of NAFTA, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, calling on Trump during a recent rally to “go back to the drawing board on NAFTA” and “not send this treaty to Congress.” The former vice president held his first rally as a 2020 presidential candidate on Monday, the same day the firefighters union publicly endorsed him. “I like Joe Biden. Joe is a friend of mine,” Sanders said, adding, “I think what we need to do with all of the candidates, have a issue-oriented campaign, not personal attacks.” Sanders said the candidates need to “talk about what we have done in our political lives, what we want to do as president and how we’re going to transform our economy so that it works for all of us and not just the 1%.” Biden and Sanders are front-runners in a crowded field of 2020 Democrats, with Biden having formally entered the presidential race only last week. So far, the candidates have largely refrained from drawing distinctions between themselves and the other Democratic contenders.