WASHINGTON – A Quinnipiac University presidential election poll last month showed President Trump trailing Joe Biden by 11 points.
It highlighted a sharp turnaround for the once robust Trump economy, triggered by the coronavirus pandemic that led to a plunge in the stock market and a sharply higher unemployment rate. The economy has been tanking ever since, and the coronavirus death count surpassed the 100,000 mark.
“In addition to a 50 percent to 39 percent national lead, Biden outscored Trump on honesty, leadership skills and caring about average Americans,” The Washington Post reported this week. “Polling also has indicated that people who dislike both Trump and Biden now lean strongly toward Biden, in a shift from 2016, when Trump won voters who disliked both candidates in the race.”
In an interview with political analyst Charlie Cook on MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell said the election was coming down to the “lesser of two evils voter, which is the final decider – they’re the people who are making up their minds two or three days ahead of time, day of. At the moment they are leaning heavily to Joe Biden even though they don’t like him; they don’t like Donald Trump more.”
“That’s right,” Cook said. “Now, to me when I look at some of these undecided voters this year or go back six months, you had a group of people that had – they thought the economy was doing really well and they gave President Trump complete credit for it, but they had real doubts, reservations about his character, about him as a person, about his leadership style, all of that. ...
“So maybe he doesn’t have a headwind because of the economy, but he’s going to lose the tailwind that I think was the one thing that was kind of keeping him going last year.”
The Quinnipiac University poll showed Trump trailing Biden by “one of the biggest gaps to date,” the Post concluded. Meantime, “Voters were split over which candidate would do a better job handling the economy, an issue that had been a source of strength for Trump before the pandemic.”
Trump’s numbers seem to have shifted, according to a poll by Fox News conducted from May 17 to May 20. They showed Trump had fallen behind Biden by 8 points. And Rasmussen Reports, whose polls had been favorable to Trump, showed Biden ahead of him by 5 points – 48 percent to 43 percent.
Elsewhere, Biden was leading Trump in key swing states.
Recent polling in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida, states that Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012 – and that Trump carried in 2016 – Biden was leading by several points.
In Michigan, for example, a key battleground that Trump “carried by a margin of 0.2 percent of the vote, Biden currently leads by an average of 5.5 points,” according to an aggregate of polls compiled by Real Clear Politics.
Beyond that, even Arizona, which hasn’t had a majority of its citizens vote for a Democratic presidential candidate since Harry S. Truman, now appears to be in play, analysts say.
It’s still a long way to the November election, but Trump is clearly in trouble, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
The nation is still struggling to overcome a pandemic that he told us would be over soon and quickly disappear. But 100,000 deaths later, it remains as deadly as ever.
