New polls are showing former Vice President Joe Biden pulling further ahead of President Donald Trump, less than five months from the presidential election.
According to CNBC, the former vice president’s lead has widened significantly since last month. RealClearPolitics currently gives Biden a 7.8% lead over Trump, a more than 2% gain since May. At this time in 2016, Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by just 1.5%.
Other polls show an even larger gap. A poll of 742 registered voters conducted by Monmouth
University shows Biden leading Trump by 11% with 52% of voters supporting Biden and 41% backing Trump. A poll conducted by ABC News and The Washington Post of 835 registered voters, also has Biden in the lead by 10%.However, some in Trump’s campaign are not worried about the numbers, saying they’ve seen this before.
“Everyone knows public polling is notoriously wrong about President Trump,” Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director, in a statement to CNBC. “Our internal data consistently shows the President running strong against a defined Joe Biden in all of our key states.”
According to RCP, Biden also holds leads, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, three pivotal swing states that Trump won in 2016.
The polls surveyed respondents following the death of George Floyd. Monmouth University polling director Patrick Murray suggested the reaction to Floyd’s death was a factor in Trump’s decline in the polls against Biden.
“The race continues to be
largely a referendum on the incumbent. The initial reaction to ongoing racial unrest in the country suggests that most voters feel Trump is not handling the situation all that well,” Murray said in a release.Biden’s rise in the polls is astonishing when considering the coronavirus has kept him from actively campaigning and forcing him to instead conduct a series of online events. Biden did speak in Philadelphia last Tuesday, saying he vows to “work to not only rebuild this nation but to build it better than it was.”
The turn in polling has left Trump battling two significant issues: the coronavirus pandemic and the protests going on across the country calling for the end of police brutality.
Trump also appears to be on the losing side of both as more than 100,000 citizens have died due to what critics are calling Trump’s slow response to the pandemic and many are calling for significant police reform in the wake of protests.