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WASHINGTON – Former Vice Presi-
dent Joe Biden continues to lead a tur-
bulent field for the Democratic presi-
dential nomination, a national USA
TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds,
but his margin over Massachusetts
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been
slashed in half. And most Democratic
voters say they could still change their
minds.
Almost exactly one year before
Election Day – and 96 days before the
opening Iowa caucuses – Biden was
backed by 26% of likely Democratic
primary and caucus voters in the sur-
vey. Warren was second at 17%, fol-
lowed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders
at 13% and South Bend, Indiana, May-
or Pete Buttigieg at 10%.
Biden’s lead over Warren, now 9
percentage points, was 18 points in the
last USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll, taken in
late August. His standing has fallen by
6 points since then; hers has risen by 3.
“My front-runner would be Biden,”
Nathaniel Dortch, 77, an Air Force re-
tiree from Moreno Valley, California,
who was among those surveyed, said
in a follow-up interview. Then he add-
ed, “I want to wait and see.”
In a sign of the prospect for changes
ahead, 18% of likely Democratic voters
were undecided. Among those with a
preferred candidate, a 57% majority
said their minds weren’t firmly made
up.

“I am undecided in supporting a
specific candidate right now because I
am not looking for the issue differen-
tial, I want someone best equipped to
take on Donald Trump,” said Freyr
Thor, 56, a tech CEO from South Pasa-
dena, California. He’s worried about
what he’s seen, and hasn’t seen, in the
Democrats’ televised debates so far.
“No one has shown me they can take
on Trump, including Biden.”
In a match-up between President
Trump and an unnamed Democratic
nominee, Trump narrowly led, 41%-
39%, with 10% supporting an un-
named third-party candidate. Another
10% were undecided. That was a shift,
albeit one within the margin of error,
from the August survey, when the un-
named Democrat held a narrow lead
over Trump, 41%-39%.
In the new poll, Republicans ex-
pressed overwhelming confidence
about the outcome of the election,
with 86% predicting the president
would win. Seventy-five percent of
Democrats said their nominee would
win. But independents by a double-
digit margin expected Trump to pre-
vail.
Despite the cloud of impeachment,
overall those surveyed predicted by
50%-40% that the president in the end
would claim a second term.
“Trump has done a lot of the things
he has set out to do,” said John Siefkas,
52, a farmer and political independent
from Osceola, Iowa, who was called in
the poll. “He needs to keep his hands
off Twitter, (but) he is doing some stuff
that is needing done that people
haven’t had the guts to do.”
William Collins, 56, an independent
who is a retired police investigator
from Fort Valley, Virginia, also plans to
vote for the president. “I believe
Trump has directed America in the
right direction, and I think he really
has the American people in his own
heart.”
Trump’s job-approval rating was
46% approve-52% disapprove, with
27% saying they “strongly” approved
and 37% saying they “strongly” disap-
proved.
The telephone poll of 1,000 regis-
tered voters nationwide, taken Oct. 23-
26, has a margin of error of plus or mi-
nus 3 percentage points. The sample
of 399 likely Democratic voters has an
error margin of 4.9 points; the sample
of 323 likely Republican voters has an
error margin of 5.5 points.

Poll shows

Biden’s

lead is

narrowing

50% overall say Trump

will be reelected

Susan Page, Savannah Behrmann
and Jeanine Santucci
USA TODAY

“My front-runner would be Biden ... I
want to wait and see.”

Nathaniel Dortchsurvey respondent

Former President Barack Obama has

a message for the “politically woke”

crowd that has become prolific on so-

cial media in recent years: Get over it.

Obama called out young progres-

sives for being too ideologically rigid

and judgmental during an interview

Tuesday moderated by “Grown-ish”

star Yara Shahidi at the Obama Foun-

dation Summit in Chicago.

“This idea of purity and you’re never

compromised and you’re always politi-

cally woke and all that stuff, you should

get over that quickly,” the two-term

Democrat said. “The world is messy.

There are ambiguities. People who do

really good stuff have flaws. People who

you are fighting may love their kids and

share certain things with you.”

Obama said he has particularly no-

ticed the trend on college campuses he

has visited with his daughterMalia. He

described it as a “danger” that is “ac-

celerated by social media.”

He said some young people appear to

think that the way to bring about change

“is to be as judgmental as possible about

other people, and that’s enough.”

Criticizing people on Twitter for do-

ing something wrong or for a poor

choice of words gives those critics a

sense of self-satisfaction, he said.

“Then I can sit and feel pretty good

about myself because, man, you see

how woke I was, I called you out,” Oba-

ma said. “If all you’re doing is casting

stones, you’re probably not going to

get that far.”

The comments were widely ap-

plauded on social media in a rare mo-

ment of bipartisan agreement.

Conservative Fox News host Tomi

Lahrensaid it was good to hear Obama

“standing up for our rightsand our val-

ues of the First Amendment.”

Lahren said Obama’s comments

made some people “remember that we

used to think Barack Obama was bad,”

but in contrast to today’s Democratic

leaders, “Obama is looking like the

voice of reason.”

“Dear 2020 Dems: Listen to Obama.

It’s important,” tweeted John Schin-

dler,a national security columnist for

the New York Observer.

University of New Mexico psycholo-

gy professor Geoffrey Miller tweeted

that Obama went after “the cheap-talk

virtue-signaling at the heart of woke on-

line cancel culture.” Miller was censured

by UNM in 2013 for a tweet deemed in-

sensitive to overweight people.

Although most responded positive-

ly to Obama’s remarks on Twitter,

Mother Jones’ Ben Dreyfusssaid the

44th president “must be getting ‘ok

boomer’d’ hard on ticktock.”

Obama: ‘Get over’

the woke culture

He warns of criticism

stoked by social media

William Cummings

USA TODAY

Former President Barack Obama

speaks at the Illinois Institute of

Technology in Chicago on Tuesday.

ASHLEE REZIN GARCIA/AP

Reporter Kevin Crowe’s name was

omitted from the byline on Wednes-

day’s 1A article about ambulance

diversions. Crowe, formerly of the

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, writes

for USA TODAY.

CORRECTIONS

4A z THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2019 z USA TODAY NEWS

For the past six years, David

Rubensteinhas been hosting private

dinners for lawmakers at the Library of

Congress, featuring interviews with

prominent historians. Now a collec-

tion of those talks has been published

Tuesdayas “The American Story: Con-

versations With Master Historians,”

by Simon & Schuster.

Rubenstein, 70, who was a White

House staffer for President Jimmy

Carter and then founded the Carlyle

Group, has become what he calls a

“patriotic philanthropist.” The billion-

aire has purchased rare copies of de-

mocracy’s documents – the Magna

Carta, the Declaration of Independ-

ence, the Constitution, the Emancipa-

tion Proclamation – and put them on

public display. And he has helped fi-

nance the restoration of many of de-

mocracy’s monuments, from Monti-

cello to the Lincoln Memorial.

After this interview, he headed to

the Jefferson Memorial to announce a

$10 million gift to build an under-

ground education center “so when

people go, they can actually learn

about Jefferson.”

Questions and answers have been

lightly edited for clarity and length.

Question: You came to Washing-

ton, by my count, eight presidents

ago, and in the wake of an impeach-

ment battle with Richard Nixon.

Does today feel like that felt?

Answer: When I came to Washing-

ton, Nixon had gone. He obviously had

the challenge of the pardon, but I think

there was a sense that (Gerald) Ford

was trying to right the ship that had

gone wrong. It was a different sort of

set of circumstances. There was no Fox

television. There wasn’t quite the

hard-core support, the always-

Trumpers. There weren’t always-Nix-

oners. The news cycle was much dif-

ferent in those days. ... And also I think

that Nixon as a lawyer recognized cer-

tain things that a lawyer would recog-

nize and he understood having been in

government, certain traditions and

certain things that you just can’t not do

or things that you have to do. And I

think it’s different today.

Q: A lot of Americans feel we’re

now in a state of crisis, a big constitu-

tional challenge. Do you think that’s

true?

A: In every era, people always think

this was the worst of times; this is the

best of times; or this has never hap-

pened before. But the truth is, when you

go back to history, we had times were

much worse than this. The Civil War – I

mean, the country was falling apart. In

the early days of the country, with

George Washington, it wasn’t clear that

the country was going to survive. World

War II, wasn’t clear what the outcome

was going to be early on. So I would say

this is a political crisis, but I don’t think

... the country’s in danger of falling

apart. The country will survive what-

ever happens now, I think.

Q: Why do you think it’s a political

crisis?

A: Well, because the two sides are at

loggerheads, and I don’t see any easy

mechanism for them to come together.

Q: What’s the lesson of history

about how we get ourselves as a na-

tion to a better place in our politics?

A: In my view, presidents, although

they are only one person, they can have

an enormous impact in the country. Lin-

coln, Washington, Roosevelt, Wilson,

Reagan – these people had a big impact.

Clearly great men and great women can

have a real impact on how a country

goes a certain direction.

Q: What are the common qualities

of those successful presidents?

A: You have to have some self-confi-

dence. They have some sense that they

need help from other people to get

something done; they can’t do it all

themselves. I think they have a sense

that their ability to be successful de-

pends on one thing: their ability to per-

suade people to follow them.

Q: Fifty years from now, what will

the historian of this era be saying?

A: Well, it depends on what ultimate-

ly happens with President Trump. So if

President Trump is not convicted, if he

is reelected and if his second term turns

out to be very successful, the economy

continues, we stay out of wars, they

might say great things. ‘Tough the first

couple of years, but look how he came

back.’ If he were to be convicted, which

there’s no evidence that that’ll happen

now, then people will say, ‘He was the

only president ever convicted.’ So it’s

too early to say.

Q&A DAVID RUBENSTEIN

‘The country will survive

whatever happens now’

David Rubenstein talks with Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell.

CAROLYN KASTER/AP

Susan Page

USA TODAY