Republican voters are more drawn to former Vice President Joe Biden than to the rest of the candidates in the crowded Democratic presidential primary field, according to a new nationwide survey.

The Hill-HarrisX poll released Monday shows that 33 percent of GOP respondents named Biden as the Democratic candidate who came the closest to sharing their political views.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg received the second-highest support among Republican voters at 30 percent and 28 percent thought Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) better aligned with their views.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg both garnered 26 percent of respondents who said the candidates closely shared their values.

Biden, the front-runner in most national polls, has long sought to position himself as the most electable challenger to President Trump.

Support for Sanders has fallen seven points among Democratic primary voters in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire or South Carolina since our last survey conducted before the Democratic presidential debate on Dec. 19, as front-runner and former Vice President Joe Biden opens up a 16-point gap over the Vermont senator with those early-state voters.

– At a respective 32% and 21% in this latest tracking poll, the standings of Biden and Sanders are essentially unchanged among Democratic primary voters nationwide since early February.

– Buttigieg has risen from virtual obscurity in February to sit at 8% nationally, and while Warren has seen her support fall in recent months, her five-point increase since February places her as a top candidate.....

The negative view is that Sen. Sanders has a high floor for his support, but he also appears to have firm ceiling on how high he can go. Pete Buttigieg has taken away voters who might be looking for a non-Biden option, and Elizabeth Warren has taken voters on the left who in 2016 went to Sanders by default. Buttigieg Warren and are equally well funded and they will be in the primary for the long term. If Sanders doesn’t win early, there is a chance that he doesn’t win at all.

It would be hard for Republicans to hijack this Obama SCOTUS nomination

Nominating a former president to the Supreme Court would be an uncommon occurrence, but it has happened once before when William Howard Taft was nominated to the court by Warren G. Harding in 1921.

The potential Supreme Court nomination of Barack Obama, though unlikely, would be hard for Republicans to stop, even if they remain in control of the Senate following the 2020 election.

After all, Obama isn’t just qualified for the position with his experience as president and as a civil rights attorney and constitutional law professor, but he isn’t plagued with a sexual misconduct scandal like Trump’s most recent SCOTUS pick, Brett Kavanaugh.

If Mitch McConnell is going to pull off his scheme to turn President Trump’s impeachment trial into a quick and painless sham with no witnesses, the Senate majority leader needs the story to be covered as a conventional Washington standoff — one that portrays both sides as maneuvering for advantage in an equivalently political manner.

But extraordinary new revelations in the New York Times about Trump’s corrupt freezing of military aid to Ukraine will — or should — make this much harder to get away with....

Among the story’s key points:

As early as June, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney worked to execute the freeze for Trump, and a top aide to Mulvaney — Robert Blair — worried it would fuel the narrative that Trump was tacitly aiding Russia.
Internal opposition was more forceful than previously known. The Pentagon pushed for the money for months. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-national security adviser John Bolton privately urged Trump to understand that freezing the aid was not in our national interest.
Trump was unmoved, citing Ukraine’s “corruption.” We now know Trump actually wanted Ukraine to announce sham investigations absolving Russia of 2016 electoral sabotage and smearing potential 2020 opponent Joe Biden. The Times report reveals that top Trump officials did not think that ostensibly combating Ukrainian “corruption” (which wasn’t even Trump’s real aim) was in our interests.
Lawyers at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) worked to develop a far-fetched legal argument that Trump could exercise commander-in-chief authority to override Congress’ appropriation of the aid, to get around the law precluding Trump from freezing it.
Michael Duffey, a political appointee at OMB, tried to get the Pentagon to assume responsibility for getting the aid released, to deflect blame away from the White House for its own role in blocking it. This led a Pentagon official to pronounce herself “speechless.”
Duffey froze the aid with highly unusual bureaucratic tactics, refused to tell Pentagon officials why Trump wanted it withheld and instructed them to keep this “closely held.” (Some of this had already been reported, but in narrative context it becomes far more damning.)

It’s impossible to square all this with the lines from Trump’s defenders — that there was no pressure on Ukraine; that the money was withheld for reasonable policy purposes; and that there was no extortion because it was ultimately released. As the Times shows, that only came after the scheme was outed.

In 2020, we must decide: Who do we want to be?

My faith teaches me that we should be a nation that not only accepts the truth of the climate crisis, but leads the world in addressing it. Pope Francis is right in “Laudato Si’”: “Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years." As president, I’ll launch a $1.7 trillion clean energy revolution to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, creating 10 million jobs and starting to heal our imperiled planet.

My faith teaches me that we should be a nation where the hard-working, middle-class families who’ve made us strong have a real chance to thrive. That’s why I’ll make sure that we reward work, not just wealth, in our policies and in our values. I’ll make sure that we provide every family with access to fair wages, quality health care, good neighborhood schools and a stable retirement.

And my faith teaches me that we should be a nation that once again welcomes the stranger and shows a preferential option for the poor, remembering how so many of us and our ancestors came here in a similar way. I’ll end Trump’s abhorrent asylum policies, protect “Dreamers” and provide a road map to citizenship for the nearly 11 million undocumented people living in and contributing to our communities every day.

Trump doesn’t understand these things, because he doesn’t understand America. He doesn’t know what it means to live for or believe in something bigger than himself.