The latest poll out of the early primary state of New Hampshire shows Democratic presidential hopeful and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders now leading longtime front-runner Hillary Clinton by a decent margin.
Forty-four percent of likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire said they prefer Sanders, while 37 percent favored Clinton, according to a new Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald poll of 442 Granite-Staters.
It's the first time Sanders has surpassed Clinton in New Hampshire. A previous March poll from the same organizations showed Sanders trailing Clinton 44 to 8.
Clinton still leads in the national polls and is generally presumed to be the likely Democratic nominee, but the results suggest Sanders, who is running on a far-left progressive platform, is going to give the former secretary of state a run for her money.
The results come the day after reports surfaced that Clinton will hand over her private email server, which she used exclusively while working as the nation's top diplomat, to the Justice Department as it deepens its criminal probe into her sending and storing of classified information, as HNGN reported.
Her involvement in the email scandal, along with reports of shady dealings involving her family charity, has sent her favorability and trustworthy ratings plummeting in other recent polls.
In the poll released Tuesday night, only 35 percent of primary voters said that they are "excited" about Clinton's campaign. Fifty-one percent said that while they may decide to support her, they aren't too excited about her candidacy. Still, 80 percent said they viewed her favorably, however, only 38 percent of those said they have a "very" favorable impression.
That's compared to more than half who said they view Sanders "very" favorably.
The self-described democratic socialist has been drawing enormous crowds across the country, 27,500 in Los Angeles Monday night and 28,000 in Portland on Sunday. He also beat out all his Republican competition when matched up head-to-head in a national CNN poll from July. Another poll released by NBC in late July found that voters in New Hampshire and Iowa had negative views for every single candidate except for Sanders.
