In the first 19 public polls released since he declared his presidential candidacy on April 25, former United States Vice President Joe Biden dominated Donald Trump in head-to-head matchups, as The Inquisitr reported, holding an average lead of 9.4 percentage points. By contrast, the last time an incumbent president faced a serious challenge — in 2012 when Republican Mitt Romney ran against President Barack Obama — the incumbent led in all but five of the early 19 polls, including two ties.
On Wednesday, Biden, a Democrat, extended his winning streak to 20, and according to the new ABC News/Washington Post poll, Biden holds one of his largest leads to date. Among registered voters in the poll, Biden pulverizes Trump, with a 15-point landslide margin of victory.
In the poll, Biden wins 55 percent support, to only 40 for Trump, leaving just 5 percent undecided.
The latest result extends Biden’s lead over Trump in all polls to 11.5 percentage points, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average. The 15-point lead is Biden’s largest since he scored a 16-point domination of Trump in a Quinnipiac poll two weeks ago, and his second-largest lead overall in the 20 polls released since Biden’s official announcement of his candidacy.
The ABC News/Washington Post also included results taken from all adults, not merely registered voters. Among that broader group, Biden’s lead is slightly wider — 54-38, a 16-point gap.
Four other Democrats — Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, California Senator Kamala Harris, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg — also hold clear leads over Trump, but by lesser margins than Biden, and none by double digits, according to an ABC News summary of the poll. Sanders leads Trump by nine points among registered voters, Harris and Warren by seven each, and Buttigieg tops Trump by four points.
Among registered voters, Trump’s level of support against any of those five Democratic candidates maxes out at 44 percent. Among all adults, his support never tops 41 percent in the new poll.
Not only does Biden continue to crush Trump in the ABC News/Washington Post poll, but when asked who they believe has the best chance of all Democrats to defeat Trump in November of 2020, Biden was the runaway choice, with 42 percent of adults who “lean” toward the Democratic Party saying that the former vice president stands the best odds against Trump. No other Democratic candidate inspired close to that level of confidence. Sanders came in 2nd, with 14 percent saying that he stood the best chance of beating Trump.
But do Democratic voters want to support the candidate most likely to beat Trump, or the candidate with whom they most closely agree on issues? On that question, 50 percent of Democratic-leaning potential voters said that beating Trump was their top priority, while 42 percent said agreement on the issues was more important.