President Donald Trump continues to react to Joe Biden's widening lead over him in the polls with even more name calling and childish insults against his foe. All major polls so far in July show Biden winning the presidency in November.
The latest one, this from NBC News/Wall Street Journal released Friday, shows 51% of registered voters will vote Biden president if the election was held today. Only 40% will vote for Trump. Trump's 40% is seven percentage points lower than the previous poll in March. On the other hand, Biden gained two percentage points. The poll also shows 56% of voters don't like the way Trump is handling the job of U.S. president while 42% feel otherwise.
The first two polls in July also showed a resounding Biden win in November. The Economist/YouGov Poll and the Hill-HarrisX general election poll both released July 15 show Biden ahead of Trump.
The Economist/YouGov Poll conducted July 5 to 7 among 1,500 registered voters showed Biden beating Trump, 49% to 40%. The Hill-HarrisX poll taken from July 3 to 4 and involving 933 registered voters revealed Biden ahead of Trump, 43% to 39%.
The average from polling data aggregator RealClear Politics has Biden beating Trump nationally by 8.7% as of last week.
Biden is widening his lead despite his public "invisibility" compared to Trump. His strategy seems to be to let Trump fail and for Trump to dominate news cycles with more examples of his incompetence. Trump has continued to oblige Biden on both counts.
Since June, Biden has held only three public virtual events and seven in-person events. All of these were either in Delaware (where he resides) or Pennsylvania (where he was born and grew-up in). Biden has only given a total of six TV interviews since the pandemic began. And Biden still leads Trump by an ever widening margin.
Trump has responded to Biden's poll advantage by not addressing the issues causing his huge unpopularity: his incompetent response to the raging COVID-19 resurgence and his coming down on the side of racists in the ongoing fight for racial equality in the wake of George Floyd's murder last May 25.
Instead, Trump is again blasting Biden as "sleepy Joe" and a "loser." He's revisited an old insult against Biden after claiming he "aced" a cognitive test the White House can't prove he took. Trump claims Biden "couldn't pass" a similar cognitive test.
He also expanded his vocabulary of insults against Biden to again claim the former vice president is "corrupt," "weak" and prone to verbal gaffes. Trump has consistently made fun of Biden's stuttering. And Trump keeps falsely claiming Biden will defund the police.
None of these childish insults has failed to slow down Biden's ascent in the polls, however. Apart from a national advantage, Biden also leads Trump in every key battleground state: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
"The Biden campaign is playing it as safe as possible," said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies. "Biden's team feels like they're ahead by a pretty sizable margin and they don't want to be making any mistakes ... They don't want him to sort of lose his train of thought, and so they're trying to make it less risky."
Democratic strategist Paul Begala is all for letting Trump be Trump. He says Trump right now is dominating the daily news cycle with his incompetence.
