September 16, 2016, 09:11 am
Rasmussen: Dems want Sanders running if Clinton drops out
By Elliot Smilowitz
If Hillary Clinton were forced to leave the presidential race due to health reasons, Democrats would want Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to replace her as the party’s nominee, a new Rasmussen poll finds.
Forty-eight percent of likely Democratic voters backed Sanders in that scenario, according to the poll released Friday.
Twenty-two percent picked Vice President Joe Biden, with 14 percent saying Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine, and nine percent choosing someone else.
Questions about Clinton’s health intensified when she suffered a health mishap in public Sunday, stumbling and struggling to enter a van outside a Sept. 11 memorial in New York.
After the incident, her campaign revealed that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia two days earlier. Clinton came off the campaign trail for several days while she recovered.
Before the incident, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and other conservatives had suggested Clinton was hiding information about her health.
Trump has repeatedly attacked Clinton’s “stamina,” and campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson claimed without evidence in August that Clinton had brain damage.
Rasmussen is a GOP-leaning pollster.
The poll found that 46 percent of voters overall said the media is making too much of Clinton’s health, while 28 percent said there wasn’t enough coverage and 21 percent said the amount of coverage was right.
Sixty-three percent of Democrats said coverage of Clinton’s health was excessive, but only 35 percent of Republicans and 39 percent of independents agreed.
Rasmussen conducted its poll of 1,000 likely voters Sept. 14-15. It has a margin of error of three percentage points.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/296283-rasmussen-dems-want-sanders-running-if-clinton-drops-out
