By Chris Kahn
NEW YORK (Reuters) - After steadily rising in popularity over the last several weeks, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg appears to have surpassed U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren among registered voters for the 2020 Democratic nomination, according to a Reuters/Ipsos national public opinion poll released on Thursday.
The Jan. 29-30 poll found that 12% of registered Democrats and independents said they would vote for Bloomberg in the state nominating contests that begin next week in Iowa. That is up from 5% in a similar poll that ran the first week of December; Bloomberg’s popularity has risen in the poll almost every week since then.
Bloomberg appears to have won over a broad coalition of potential voters, including Baby Boomers, high-income earners, rural Americans and Democrats without a college degree, according to an analysis of the last two months of Reuters/Ipsos polling.
He still trails former Vice President Joe Biden, who was supported by 23% of registered voters in the poll, and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who received the backing of 18%.
Warren, who has received serious consideration by many Democrats this year but recently has struggled to explain how she would pay for her Medicare for all program, dropped 3 points to 10% support.
Billionaire Tom Steyer, New York businessman Andrew Yang and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, all received 4%.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 565 people who identified as registered voters and said they were affiliated either as Democrats or independents. It has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 5 percentage points.