President Trump says he doesn’t fear Joe Biden in a general election, but the former vice president is Trump’s most serious opponent in key battleground states.
“We need help to beat Sleepy Joe Biden? I don’t think so,” Trump said in November in Bossier City, Louisiana, where he was stumping for the Republican gubernatorial candidate.
Electability is a critical factor among Democratic primary voters, many of whom want nothing more than simply to oust Trump. And even though Biden is not as far Left as much of the Democratic base, Biden’s ability to beat the president remains a strong selling point for him.
“Biden’s biggest advantage may be that more Democratic voters see him as electable as say that about any of the other frontrunners,” the polling website YouGov wrote last month. “A majority (57%) of Democratic voters believe Biden can win the 2020 general election against President Trump, and just 19 percent believe he will lose.”
And despite Trump’s suggestion to the contrary, “the White House has been thinking about Joe Biden for quite some time,” said one Republican operative. In a sign of concern, the president has frequently drawn attention to Biden, who remains the front-runner in the Democratic field and is seen as the candidate to beat, as has Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale.
Biden leads all Democrats in a hypothetical match-up against Trump, topping the president in polling late last year among likely voters in key states such as Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In Wisconsin, Trump no longer leads Biden as he did in November, according to a Marquette poll. The RealClearPolitics polling average for Biden against Trump puts the vice president ahead by 4 points.
Nevertheless, in blue Virginia, which Hillary Clinton won handily in 2016, Biden only leads Trump by four, according to a December Mason-Dixon poll. Last year, during a trip to the state, Trump instructed Pence to “tell them we think Virginia is in play and that I’m going to be there.”
And nationally, Biden’s lead against Trump has been inconsistent. The RealClearPolitics‘ polling average shows support for Biden has fallen falling by half from +9 points in November to +4.5 in December. “Joe Biden was a terrible candidate the first two times he ran for president, and there’s no reason to believe he has suddenly improved,” communications director Tim Murtaugh told the Washington Examiner.
The president will need to assuage the concerns of suburban voters “who may agree with the general direction of many of his policies but are unsettled about how he handles himself personally,” veteran political operative and former Bush adviser Karl Rove told the Washington Examiner. “They voted for him. If you look at the exit polls, you’ve got 36% of the electorate that say, ‘We like him, he’s qualified, he’s got the right background, the right temperament, and he’s agent of change — we’re for him.’ And 9% said we don’t like him, ‘We don’t think he’s qualified, we don’t think he has the right temperament, but he’s an agent of change, and we hate her more,'” Rove said, referring to Clinton. “Some have since been convinced by what he has done in office that his is worthy of their support, but he still has some work to do,” Rove said.
In his annual predictions column on Dec. 31 in the Wall Street Journal, Rove wrote: “Victory depends on Mr. Trump’s discipline and whom the Democrats nominate. If it’s Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump has an uphill fight; if not, the president wins.”
Murtaugh said that while it is unclear who will emerge as the Democrat’s nominee, with the president’s record on jobs and the economy, the campaign is indifferent. “Democrats will undo all of that success,” he said, listing Democratic policy positions on healthcare, immigration, and the Green New Deal. “The choice will be clear in state after state in November.”
