Since former vice president Joe Biden declared his candidacy for the Democratic 2020 presidential nomination on April 25 of this year, 19 public polls pitting Biden directly against Donald Trump in a one-on-one matchup have been released. With the latest such poll released on Tuesday, according to The Hill , Biden continued his undefeated streak against the president, this time battering Trump with a 12-percentage-point margin of victory.
The new poll released by Investor’s Business Daily and the TIPP polling agency shows Biden with a nationwide lead of 12 percentage points over Trump, taking 54 percent support in the poll to just 42 for Trump. The poll shows no statistically significant changes in the general election contest between Biden and Trump since the previous IBD/TIPP poll released about one month ago. In that poll, Biden also registered 54 percent, while Trump held 41 percent.
The new poll not only continues Biden’s unbeaten record in polls against Trump but leaves him with a sizable, 9.4-point advantage in the average of all Biden vs. Trump polls, compiled by the political data site RealClearPolitics .
Of the 19 polls released since Biden’s April 25 announcement, only one has shown the hypothetical race against Trump as even close. That was an Emerson College poll released at the start of August, showing Biden with only a two-point lead over the president. No other poll in that time period has shown Biden with a lead slimmer than six points — and in 10 of the 19 polls, Biden leads Trump by double digits.
Despite the fact that polling indicates a one-sided race between Biden and Trump, with Biden winning comfortably, the 76-year-old former six-term U.S. Senator from Delaware continues to face questions about his candidacy from the campaign media, most recently in a Tuesday New York Times column by Mark Leibovich which asked the question, “why is he running?”
The New York Times piece drew an incredulous response from journalist Eric Boehlert, of Rolling Stone , Salon, and other publications, who asked via his Twitter account, “if in September 2011 (Mitt) Romney was up 16 points vs. (then-incumbent Barack) Obama, you think NYT would’ve run A1 piece claiming nobody knows why Romney’s running?”
In fact, as The Inquisitr reported, there has been a stark contrast between media coverage of the Romney vs. Obama race eight years ago, and the Biden-Trump matchup this time around.
In the first 19 polls released after Romney announced his candidacy for the 2012 Republican nomination, as of June 2, 2011, he led incumbent president Obama in only three, and scored a tie in two others, according to RealClearPolitics .
And yet a HuffPost headline in 2011 touted Romney as within “striking distance” of Obama. A Guardian headline warned of Obama’s “shock poll slump,” while the Los Angeles Times warned of Obama “losing ground” against not just Romney but “any Republican.”
Yet few headlines from major media outlets have yet declared Trump’s 2020 candidacy to be in danger despite his repeated hammering in the polls and failure to even come close to Biden in almost every poll released since April 25.
“Any other incumbent in his lowly polling position would likely be getting hammered by the pundit class as it dubbed his presidency a failure,” wrote Boehlert in a recent Daily Kos column. “But not Trump.”