Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren each started the month scraping perilously close to the bottom of their campaign bank accounts, posing an existential threat to their candidacies as the Democratic primary goes national.

They’re up against well-funded machines threatening to dominate the Democratic race: Bernie Sanders, whose recent rise in the polls has come during a major spending streak fueled by his online donors, and billionaire Mike Bloomberg, whose personal fortune has vaulted him into the middle of the campaign to take on President Donald Trump.

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LAS VEGAS — Mike Bloomberg is privately lobbying Democratic Party officials and donors allied with his moderate opponents to flip their allegiance to him — and block Bernie Sanders — in the event of a brokered national convention.

The effort, largely executed by Bloomberg’s senior state-level advisers in recent weeks, attempts to prime Bloomberg for a second-ballot contest at the Democratic National Convention in July by poaching supporters of Joe Biden and other moderate Democrats, according to two Democratic strategists familiar with the talks and unaffiliated with Bloomberg.

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Joe Biden's once-yawning advantage in South Carolina is now just a narrow lead over Bernie Sanders and Tom Steyer, according to a Winthrop University poll released Thursday.

In the poll, Biden is at 24 percent support. He’s followed by Sanders’ 19 percent and Steyer’s 15 percent — the only other candidates in double-digits.

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Emgage PAC, which calls itself the biggest Muslim political action committee in the country, is throwing its weight behind Bernie Sanders.

The organization, which has chapters and affiliates in 11 states, is the latest in a series of high-profile Muslim groups and elected officials to endorse the Vermont senator.

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You’re probably having a bad night if Chuck Todd asks, “Should you exist?”

That was the gutting query from one of the NBC moderators to Mike Bloomberg about 80 minutes into the former New York mayor’s debate debut Wednesday evening in Las Vegas.

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LAS VEGAS — It took less than five minutes for Elizabeth Warren to set the tone for Wednesday’s debate.

She lept into the middle of a Bernie Sanders-MikeBloomberg tiff over electability to denounce Bloomberg’s treatment of women, stirring waves of applause in the debate hall — and setting off a rollicking two hours when the Democratic presidential candidates finally said what they really think about each other.

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Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg's campaigns have both requested recounts from targeted precincts in this month's Iowa caucuses, according to an announcement from the state Democratic Party late Wednesday.

Sanders' campaign asked the party to recount 10 precincts from Feb. 3's caucuses, the state party said, while Buttigieg's campaign asked for recounts from 54 precincts, with one of the precincts overlapping.

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Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren seized an opportunity to criticize the online behavior of some of Sen. Bernie Sanders supporters, saying their harassment and threats could hurt party unity in the general election; it sparked a pile-on to the self-described democratic socialist.

“I've said many times before, we are all responsible for our supporters and we need to step up,” Warren said. “That's what leadership is all about.”

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The vice presidency—likened to a “warm bucket of piss” by John Nance Garner, who suffered eight years in the office under FDR, and called a political dead end by others—has miraculously become Washington’s second most desirable job.

It’s not that the job has changed. What’s given the vice presidency a new sheen is the advanced age of four leading contenders for the presidency—Donald Trump, 73; Bernie Sanders, 78; Mike Bloomberg, 78; and Joe Biden, 77. None of the four amigos is likely to croak tomorrow, but the actuarial odds are bending against them. One scholar on aging reports that Trump has an 84.8 percent chance of surviving a 2020 term, while Sanders, Bloomberg and Biden rate several percentage points worse.

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Democrats came out hot in Las Vegas on Wednesday with a new target onstage: Mike Bloomberg.

For the first time since his late entry into the race and after a $400 million ad campaign, Bloomberg faced five other Democrats eager to take him down in an unscripted environment.

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LAS VEGAS — Free tacos. Agua de jamaica. A futbol tourney.

Bernie Sanders’ “Unidos con Bernie” event Monday was unlike any other hosted by his rivals in Nevada, where polls indicate he’s leading among Latino voters.

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Americans have a clear message for President Donald Trump and the Democratic candidates vying to replace him: Lower health care costs.

The vast majority of Americans rank cutting health care and prescription drug costs as their top priorities heading into election season, regardless of party affiliation, according to a new POLITICO-Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health survey.

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Senate Democrats aren’t ready to make Mike Bloomberg president. But they sure don’t mind him spending a slice of his personal fortune on ads targeting President Donald Trump.

The billionaire former New York mayor is rising in the polls after flooding the airwaves and is seeing a quick uptick in enthusiasm from House Democrats, winning 13 endorsements. But he has yet to secure a single Senate backer.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday night said he condemns any supporters who make “vicious attacks” on others.

Sanders’ supporters came under fire last week after Nevada’s powerful Culinary Union criticized the independent Vermont senator’s “Medicare for All” proposal. According to the Nevada Independent, two top union officials received threatening messages by phone, email and Twitter from Sanders’ supporters. The union announced Friday that it would not endorse a political candidate ahead of the Nevada caucuses this Saturday.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders broke with one of his highest-profile surrogates Tuesday on his signature Medicare for All proposal, suggesting that his policy proposal is already a compromise.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told HuffPost last week that a worst-case scenario with Sanders in the White House is a compromise on health care that ends up adding a public option.

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Pete Buttigieg's already narrow state delegate equivalent lead over Bernie Sanders has reduced further, to less than a hundredth of a percentage point, after the Iowa Democratic Party announced the results of a recanvass of targeted precincts from the state's Democratic caucuses.

Buttigieg now leads Sanders by .08 state delegate equivalents, according to results posted by the state party — 26.186 percent for Buttigieg to 26.182 percent for Sanders. The initial results were marred by apparent reporting or mathematical errors.

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"Medicare for All" is roiling labor unions across the country, threatening to divide a critical part of the Democratic base ahead of several major presidential primaries.

In union-heavy primary states like California, New York, and Michigan, the fight over single-payer health care is fracturing organized labor, sometimes pitting unions against Democratic candidates that vie for their support.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders solidified his frontrunner status on Tuesday in the race to win the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, building a double-digit lead over the rest of the field in a poll released ahead of Saturday's Nevada caucuses.

It was Mike Bloomberg who seized many of the early headlines from the release of the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, which qualified the billionaire self-funder for his first appearance at a Democratic presidential debate. But the former New York mayor finished second in the poll behind Sanders, who finished 12 percentage points clear of second-place Bloomberg.

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A new survey shows Democratic presidential candidates Mike Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden locked in a tight race in Virginia just two weeks before its Super Tuesday primary.

Both Bloomberg and Sanders enjoy the support of 22 percent of respondents who are likely to participate in the Democratic primary, according to a Monmouth University poll released on Tuesday.

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