Poll Watch: Biden’s lead over Trump has increased, despite Tara Reade allegations

Don­ald Trump and Joe Biden have both had a chal­leng­ing week.

The source of Trump’s woes is, of course, his administration’s ongo­ing sham­bol­ic response to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. Ear­li­er this week Trump – in an obvi­ous attempt to declare some sort of pre­ma­ture vic­to­ry over the virus – declared that he was con­sid­er­ing wind­ing down the White House coro­n­avirus task force.

Faced with an imme­di­ate pub­lic back­lash, he reversed course in under twen­ty-four hours, but made it very clear that his deci­sion had absolute­ly no basis in pub­lic health sci­ence: “I had no idea how pop­u­lar the task force is until actu­al­ly yes­ter­day when I start­ed talk­ing about wind­ing it down!”

Biden’s rough week was caused by an entire­ly dif­fer­ent set of circumstances.

In late March Tara Reade, a for­mer Sen­ate staffer, claimed in a pod­cast inter­view that in 1993 then-Sen­a­­tor Biden sex­u­al­ly assault­ed her.

This claim took some time to be cov­ered by big media, but the sec­ond half of April saw mount­ing atten­tion paid to the alle­ga­tions – at the same time as Ms. Reade’s fam­i­ly and neigh­bors came for­ward to cor­rob­o­rate her claims.

Biden did not help him­self with his slow response to Reade’s alle­ga­tion. Instead of quick­ly address­ing the issue him­self, Biden opt­ed to let high-pro­­file Demo­c­ra­t­ic women defend him in TV inter­views – while pro­vid­ing them with inac­cu­rate talk­ing points. Biden only broke his long silence on Fri­day to issue a blan­ket pub­lic denial of the accu­sa­tions: “I’m say­ing unequiv­o­cal­ly it nev­er, nev­er happened.”

How­ev­er, the lat­est poll from Mon­mouth Uni­ver­si­ty seems to show that Biden’s slow response to the Reade accu­sa­tions has not hurt him with vot­ers; the poll, released on Wednes­day, showed Biden with an increased lead over Trump of 50% to 41%. The sur­vey – which began ask­ing respon­dents about Tara Reade’s alle­ga­tions after Biden’s pub­lic denial on Fri­day – showed that the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of peo­ple (86%) have heard about the story.

Patrick Mur­ray (Direc­tor of Monmouth’s polling insti­tute) explained that although head­lines about Reade’s accu­sa­tions may affect the for­mer Vice President’s favor­a­bil­i­ty rat­ings, “most vot­ers still see this elec­tion as a ref­er­en­dum on Trump.”

Even with the survey’s 3.6% mar­gin of error, Biden holds a com­fort­able lead over Don­ald Trump, news that will be wel­come for Democrats.

How­ev­er, the Democ­rats can­not not rest on their lau­rels – Don­ald Trump was elect­ed in 2016 by the Elec­toral Col­lege despite los­ing the pop­u­lar vote to Hillary Clin­ton by near­ly three mil­lion votes.

The Repub­li­cans have shown over the past few years that they will do any­thing to keep this state of affairs in place. To name just one exam­ple, Flori­da Repub­li­cans are fight­ing tooth and nail to clamp down vot­ing restric­tions on ex-felons in the state – despite a 2018 bal­lot mea­sure that restored those felons’ vot­ing rights.

The onslaught of COVID-19 has not slowed Repub­li­can attempts at vot­er sup­pres­sion at all. In the vital­ly impor­tant state of Wis­con­sin, the Repub­li­cans delib­er­ate­ly turned the state’s pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry into a chaot­ic mess, putting hun­dreds of thou­sands of Wis­con­sinites in dan­ger of catch­ing the virus – all with the intent of stop­ping “unde­sir­able” vot­ers from exer­cis­ing their vot­ing rights.

Democ­rats will need to be on the look out for such tac­tics in the run-up to Novem­ber. The COVID-19 cri­sis has only rein­forced how vital­ly impor­tant it is to get Don­ald Trump out of office and install some­one (lit­er­al­ly any­one) more com­pe­tent, less ego­tis­ti­cal, and less cav­a­lier with Amer­i­cans’ lives.