Welcome to the lid for Meet the Press, I'm Mark Murray. One of the fascinating twists to the 2020 Democratic race for President is that two of the leading candidates, Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg, haven't been historically the biggest fans of Barack Obama, even though the former president continues to be the most popular Democrat in the available polling. Although he's praised Obama debates, Sanders said in an interview in 2011 that Obama should receive a primary challenge. I think there are millions of Americans who are deeply disappointed in the President.
I think it would do this country a good deal of service. If people started thinking about candidates out there, to begin contrasting what is a progressive agenda as opposed to what Obama is doing. And even though he's featured Obama in some of his television ads, Bloomberg said at a private event four years ago that his 2012 endorsement of Obama was backhanded, and that Mitt Romney might have done a better job as president. Here's the audio from that event that CNN had covered.
In the second Obama election, I wrote a very backhanded endorsement of Obama saying I thought he hadn't done the right thing, hadn't done the right thing, so I can report. And Romney would be a better person doing that. Romney did not stick with the values they had when he was governor of Massachusetts. With South Carolina's primary just a day away, the Obama factor and Democratic voters' impressions of his presidency remains one of the essential storylines in this Democratic contest.
In South Carolina's Democratic race four years ago, a whopping 74% of Democratic voters said that they wanted a candidate to continue Obama's policies, according to the exit poll. And Hillary Clinton won these voters by more than 60 points. By contrast, 16% said that they wanted a candidate who held more liberal policies than Obama's, and Sanders won those voters by a 55% to 45% margin. In the few demographic groups that Sanders carried in that 2016 contest, in 2020's races, we've continued to see Obama's presence loom large.
According to the exit poll in the New Hampshire primary, which Sanders won by a narrow margin over P. Buttigieg, 40% of Democratic primary voters said that the next president should return to Obama's policies, and they mostly broke away from Bernie Sanders. That was compared with 39% who said that they wanted to change the more liberal policies, and Sanders won a disproportionate share of those voters. In the build up to South Carolina, we've seen Joe Biden, Obama's former vice president, who's the Obama factor against Sanders.
Here was Biden in Tuesday's Democratic debate. He thought Barack Obama, he wanted a primary, we should primary Barack Obama. Someone should, and in fact the president was weak, and our administration was in fact not up to it. And it all sets up one of the central arguments in this Democratic race.
Should the next Democratic president resemble Obama, his policies in his demeanor, or should it completely break away, and go in a different direction? That's a lid for us. We'll be back next week with fresh breakdowns of South Carolina's primary, as well as Super Deeper Tuesday. Be sure to download us on your favorite podcast app.