Joe Biden doesn’t believe being stuck in his Delaware home’s basement is hurting his chances of becoming president.
The presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee bristled when asked Tuesday about when he expected to restart his campaign for the White House ahead of the general election.
“We’re on the campaign trail now. And everybody says, ‘You know Biden’s hiding.’ Well, let me tell you something — we’re doing very well,” he told ABC News.
“As a matter of fact, we’re winning, if you look at all the polling data,” said the two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator.
Biden, on average, leads President Trump by 4.4 percentage points in early polling, according to RealClearPolitics data. But that margin is likely to tighten closer to November.
On Tuesday, Biden conceded he was “anxious to go out and campaign,” insisting he wasn’t “trying to avoid it.” Instead, he told ABC News in a short interview that he was “trying to set an example as to how we should proceed in terms of dealing with this health and economic crisis,” taking a dig at Trump for “showing up to places without masks.”
“The idea that somehow we’re being hurt by keeping to the rules and following the instructions that have been put forward by the docs is absolutely bizarre,” he said.
Trump has seized on Biden’s absence from a traditional campaign trail amid the coronavirus pandemic, with Fox News hosts such as Laura Ingraham mocking him by saying it’s to Biden’s advantage because he’s less likely to make verbal missteps when talking with voters.
In the space of just a few hours, both candidates blurt out truth:
On ABC, Biden dismisses basement critique, notes he’s winning and all but says scoreboard, as @MarcACaputo notes
And Trump, eager to have some fodder to work with, pushes out the below https://t.co/llzO7LmD1t
— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) May 12, 2020
Democratic strategists also contend ceding the spotlight to the incumbent benefits Biden, given the administration’s haphazard handling of the COVID-19 outbreak.
“He’s been incompetent in the way in which he’s responded to it,” Biden said Tuesday of Trump.
