Via Morning Consult:
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has a ways to go if he wants to win as a third-party candidate for president. According to a new Morning Consult poll, Bloomberg, an independent, gets just 12 percent of voters when competing in a three-way race with the Democratic underdog candidate Bernie Sanders and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. Sanders, a democratic socialist who has recently tightened the race with frontrunner Hillary Clinton, gets 35 percent of voters. Trump gets a nearly identical 34 percent.
Bloomberg is considering entering the race as an independent, third-party candidate if Trump and Sanders are the eventual nominees, the New York Times reported on Saturday, because he could compete with two candidates on the fringes of their parties. But Bloomberg’s poll numbers barely change when he is competing against Sanders instead of Clinton. In a Morning Consult poll released last week, Bloomberg got 13 percent of voters, Clinton got 36 percent and Trump got 37 percent.