Hi, this is Miss Molly and I just finished up teaching point class at Melissa Hoffman Dance Center in Hudson New Hampshire.

This podcast was recorded at...

2.13 pm on Tuesday, February 18th.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be demanding pointed feet and straight knees.

Enjoy the show! A 5, 6, 7, 8.

Now if they all said that in unison while being on pointed feet, I'd be quite impressed.

She sounds tough. I'm grandmother as a ballet dancer. I'm scared.

Hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid, I'm covering the presidential campaign.

I'm Danielle Kurtzle, and I also cover the campaign.

And I'm Dominican Montenegro Senior Political Editor and correspondent.

So tomorrow Democrats will take the debate stage again, this time in Nevada. And ahead of that debate, we've got a new NPR PBS NewsHour Marist poll out today with some pretty big news.

Dominican, why don't you just start by giving us the headlines?

Well, number one Bernie Sanders. The Vermont Senators opened up a double digit lead. He's got 31% of the votes. His highest number so far in our poll.

And he's above now Michael Bloomberg, who is now rocketed to second in our poll.

He's got 19 points. He's leapfrogged former vice president Joe Biden, who's now down to 15%.

That's astounding. It really is quite something considering how long Joe Biden led in a lot of these polls.

But you know, if you're going to make the point that I'm the most electable candidate, you got to win somewhere and there hasn't been a lot of winning so far.

And importantly, our poll gives Mike Bloomberg his fourth poll above 10% which qualifies him for Wednesday's debate.

So this will be the first time he'll actually be on a debate stage. And we're going to talk more about that in a second. But Danielle first, why don't you just give us a quick background of who Michael Bloomberg is?

I feel like for a lot of our listeners, we just keep referencing the fact that he is a billionaire. He has a lot of cash. But beyond that, who is he?

So Michael Bloomberg was a three term mayor of New York City. And we can get into later some of the controversies about that mayorhood because there were some policies most pointedly stop and frisk.

That he is getting a lot of attention for and a lot of bad attention for in this field. I think we can pretty safely put him as one of the more moderate candidates.

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