Outgoing Vice-President Joe Biden looks on as Donald Trump shakes hands with Barack Obama at Trump’s January 20, 2017 Presidential inauguration. The numbers are strongly suggesting that Trump will be handing the keys to the White House to Biden following the 2020 Presidential election. Photo by: U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Cristian L. Ricardo (Public Domain).
The numbers are growing worse every week for U.S. President Donald Trump. With every new poll, the chances that the incumbent Republican will win a second term in the White House look to be growing slimmer.
The latest numbers to drop, an ABC News/Washington Post poll, show Biden at 55% among registered voters, compared to 40% for Trump. Even right wing Fox News is showing Biden with a 49-41 lead on Trump. The Fox poll revealed that Biden is ahead of Trump with women (+19 points), blacks (+64), hispanics (+30), millennials (+22), suburban voters (+11) and independents (+11). Only men (+5 points) favor Trump.
As recently as March, the two were in a virtual dead heat for the Presidency.
The same poll showed that Trump had a 60% disapproval rating among voters. Even worse for him, his numbers in terms of the economy, an area where Trump appeared to be maintaining his advantage over Biden in the eyes of the electorate dipped behind Biden.
Fox News showed Biden with a one-point edge on Trump in terms of who’s better equipped to run the economy. A month earlier, Trump held a three-point advantage when voters were asked the same question.
Voters also favored Biden in terms of mental soundness, judgment, compassion and intelligence. They also felt Biden would be doing a better job than Trump of handling America’s current major issues with race relations and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The challenger was more popular in several key swing states such as Michigan, Arizona and Florida. Even Texas was showing Biden with a slight lead.
Odds Mounting Against Trump
As is his nature, the combative Trump was quick to lash out and seek to delegitimize the latest numbers suggesting that his hold on the Oval Office was in jeopardy.
“The Trump Campaign has more ENTHUSIASM, according to many, than any campaign in the history of our great Country – Even more than 2016,” Trump tweeted. “Biden has NONE! The Silent Majority will speak on NOVEMBER THIRD!!! Fake Suppression Polls & Fake News will not save the Radical Left.”
It isn’t only the polls that are going south for Trump. At online betting sites, the odds of Trump getting elected are also in free fall. The latest betting line shows Biden as the -175 favorite to win the Nov. 3 election. Those are the shortest odds ever offered on the former Vice-President.
Meanwhile, the betting odds on a second term in the Oval Office for Trump have climbed to +150.
This should be far more alarming to Trump than his poll numbers. In the lead up to the 2016 Presidential election, while the polls heavily favored Democrat Hillary Clinton, the betting sites saw the race as being much closer.
Some oddsmakers even outlined a path to victory for Trump in the days prior to Americans going to the polls.
Politics Of Division
Donald Trump’s disastrous spring and summer could spell an end to his Presidency. Photo by: Michael Vadon (flickr).
Trump is doubling down on the divisive rhetoric that won for him in 2016. He’s selling himself as the law and order President, stealing that slogan as well as the silent majority tag from Richard Nixon campaigns in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Trump is seeking to paint cities where Black Lives Matters protests continue as lawless dens of anarchy. What he fails to recognize is that if this is indeed the case, it happened on his watch.
However, Trump’s biggest downfall figures to be his utter failure at dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. He chose to downplay it and ignore it and now, four million Americans are infected and 145,000 are dead.
In the past week, Trump changed his tune and the man who encouraged the country to open up before it was safe to do so and turned wearing a mask during a pandemic into a culture war was now preaching to the same people to take necessary precautions against COVID-19.
Massive outbreaks in Republican strongholds like Texas, Florida and Arizona, places that heeded Trump’s demand to restart the economy, have backfired on him. The Republican National Convention, slated for Jacksonville, Fla., was canceled last week, a telling blow to how wrong of a call his was by the President.
Running On His Record
The biggest difference for Trump this time around is that he must run on his record. This isn’t 2016, when he asked Americans what they had to lose by voting for him?
“Trump’s problem is that he wants to run a campaign like it’s 2016, but he’s been the guy in charge for the last four years,” Heidi Heitkamp, former Democratic senator from North Dakota, told The Guardian.
Trump’s tenure is playing out similar to that of George H.W. Bush, the last one-term Republican President. Bush’s campaign was torpedoed by a terrible final year in charge and he lost to Democrat Bill Clinton.
“It is very hard to envision a scenario where you can make an argument for the president’s reelection if unemployment is well over 10% and there’s no sign that the pandemic is under control,” Republican strategist Michael Steel told The Guardian.
