Is Joe Biden really losing to Trump by 10 points?: After months of polls showing a race within a couple of points, a new Washington Post poll has Donald Trump ahead by double digits. But even the newspaper itself notes that the poll is an outlier.
That New Joe Biden Poll
When one looks at RealClear Politics’ page for polls of a hypothetical general election matchup between President Biden and former President Trump, four of the last six polls listed have the race tied.
However, there are a couple of polls that stand out, including the most recent one listed: An ABC News/Washington Post poll that has Trump up by 10 points. A recent The Messenger/HarrisX also has Trump up by 5, and those two are enough to put Trump up by an average of 1.6 points.
Of course, neither primary season has yet happened, and neither Biden or Trump is even officially the nominee of their party yet. Election Day is still over a year away, and there are a thousand things that could happen between now and then. No one could have guessed in September of 2019, after all, what shape the 2020 election would take.
The Washington Post, in a rather extraordinary story on Sunday, acknowledged that its own poll was an outlier compared to most other recent polling of the race.
“The Post-ABC poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 10 percentage points at this early stage in the election cycle, although the sizable margin of Trump’s lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead heat,” the Post story said of the poll. “The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump’s and Biden’s coalitions in this survey, suggest it is probably an outlier.”
The poll also has Trump with a 20-point lead over Joe Biden among voters under 35, which is very much at odds with what happened in 2020.
“It seems very unlikely Trump is leading Biden by 20 points among voters under the age of 35, which is what you have to believe to believe this poll’s numbers are accurate,” journalist James Surowiecki said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Meanwhile, Axios wrote another extraordinary story about Biden on Tuesday- about the lengths the president’s team is taking to make sure Biden doesn’t trip or fall. This has included exercises with a physical therapist, using short stairs on Air Force One, and wearing different sneakers.
The report comes amid several polls that have shown that voters are concerned with the president’s advanced age.
“Democrats, including some in the administration, are terrified that Biden will have a bad fall — with a nightmare scenario of it happening in the weeks before the November 2024 election,” Axios reported. “Some senior Democrats privately have been frustrated with Biden’s advance team for months, citing the sandbag incident and noting that the president often appears not to know which direction to go after he speaks at a podium.”
The story notes that Biden’s staff fears an incident such as the one in the 1996 campaign when Republican nominee Bob Dole fell off a stage, at a time when his younger opponent, Bill Clinton, had been making hay of Dole’s age. However Dole, who was 73 at the time of the 1996 race, lived to be 98 years old, and had even worked as a lobbyist well into his 90s.
Furthermore, Donald Trump isn’t exactly young himself.
The Axios story also included a note about Former President Trump’s own “erratic behavior” as of late, which has “raised concerns about the former president’s mental state.” Over the weekend on Truth Social, the former president accused outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley of a “treasonous act” and implied that if he returned to the presidency, he would retaliate against NBC News and its parent company, Comcast.
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