Progressive Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren tops the field for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination in a new poll, though other voter surveys have former vice president Joe Biden in the lead. The fresh surveys landed as one of the race's low-polling candidates, congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio, announced Thursday he was dropping out of the race.

While second- and third-tier candidates flounder, Warren and Biden have battled for primacy. The 70-year-old Warren was backed by 28 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters in a poll published Thursday by Quinnipiac University.

The more centrist 76-year-old Biden, who has led most polling since joining the White House race, received 21 percent. Liberal Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who recently suffered a heart attack, was at 15 percent in the Quinnipiac survey while Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was at 10 percent, his strongest showing yet in major national polling.

California Senator Kamala Harris received five percent while Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota was at three percent. While Warren topped the Quinnipiac poll, Biden came out well ahead in a CNN survey published Wednesday and conducted by independent research company SSRS.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019