A new poll on the 2020 presidential race just changed the entire landscape of the upcoming election — and it’s awful news for former Vice President Joe Biden.
Biden has slipped in the Democratic polls, while Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-V.T., and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete have climbed.
Sanders has a sizable lead in the 20-person Democratic primary field, Emerson reported Monday
On the Republican side, President Donald Trump commands a huge lead against the establishment candidate, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld. Trump leads 85 to 15 percent.
“Senator Bernie Sanders ahead of the pack with 29%, followed by former Vice President Joe Biden at 24%,” Emerson reported. “They were followed by Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 9%, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Senator Kamala Harris at 8%, and Senator Elizabeth Warren at 7%. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang and former HUD secretary Julian Castro were at 3%.”
On Monday, Sanders responded to the poll and released 10 years of his long-anticipated tax returns. He had refused to release the information during the 2016 presidential election.
The release confirmed that Sanders’ income is in the top one percent of American earners, but gives very little to charity.
During his first presidential bid, Sanders released just one year of his tax returns despite primary rival Hillary Clinton pushing him to follow her lead and release multiple years of tax information.
He declined to do so, disclosing only his tax return for 2014. Tax transparency has been in the spotlight as Donald Trump bucks decades of presidential tradition by declining to show voters his tax filings and House Democrats seek to force him to turn them over.
During a Fox News Channel town hall on Monday, Sanders said that he’d increased his income by publishing a book and that he wouldn’t apologize for that.
The filings show that Sanders, who throughout his career has blamed problems on “millionaires and billionaires” and called on the 1 percent to give more, is among the top 1 percent of earners in the U.S.
Sanders, 77, has also listed Social Security payments for each year of the decade of tax returns he made available Monday. By 2018, his wife, aged 69, was also taking Social Security, providing the couple with nearly $52,000 for the year on top of the millions in book sales.
Sanders’ status as a multi-millionaire, which he acknowledged last week, was firmly cemented in his 2017 statement.
That year, Sanders disclosed $1.31 million income, combined from his Senate salary and $961,000 in book royalties and sales. His higher income in two of the three most recent years could potentially prompt questions from voters about his frequent criticisms of the influence that millionaires and billionaires have over the political process.
Despite being multi-millionaires and owning three houses, Sanders and his wife disclosed only $36,300 in charitable contributions in 2017 — less than 3 percent of his income.
Critics said that $25,000 of that charity giving was as a grant to launch the Sanders Institute, his own nonprofit group that hire his step-son, David Criscoll, as executive director.
Sanders and his wife put the institute on hiatus last month amid criticism that the nonprofit blurred lines between family, fundraising and campaigning.
The Associated Press contributed to this article