President Donald Trump’s all-time low rating on his handling of the Coronavirus pandemic is threatening his re-election chances by enabling former Vice President Joe Biden to expand the Electoral map, according to polls released by CBS/YouGov on Sunday.
According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week, 67 percent disapprove of the way Trump is “handling the response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19)” while just 33 percent approve. It is Trump’s lowest mark since polling organizations started surveying Coronavirus issues in March.
And these low marks are hurting Trump in critical Sun Belt states that are now Coronavirus hot spots. The CBS/YouGov polls found that Biden leads by Trump by six points in the critical swing state of Florida and is virtually tied with the president in Arizona and Texas.
The polling found that “Biden has made gains in part because most say their state’s efforts to contain the virus are going badly — and the more concerned voters are about risks from the outbreak, the more likely they are to support Biden.”
The polls found that nearly seven-in-10 voters in these states are taking the Coronavirus crisis very seriously, and “nine in 10 Biden backers cite the coronavirus outbreak as a major factor in their vote, more so than the economy.”
Nearly six-in-10 voters in these important states believe their states re-opened too soon, and nearly seven-in-10 voters in these three states think their states re-opened “under pressure from the Trump administration.”
Nationally, ABC/Ipsos found that Trump’s Coronavirus approval rating plummeted because of “plunging support among independents and even waning support among Republicans.”
Just 26 percent of independents approve of Trump’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic compared to 40 percent in mid-June while “Trump’s disapproval among independents has risen to 73%, up from 59% in the June poll.”
While 90 percent of Republicans approved of his Coronavirus response in mid-June, just 78 percent do now. In addition, according to ABC/Ipsos, Trump’s 22 percent disapproval rating among Republicans now “is a more than two-fold increase from last month.”
Perhaps even more importantly, the poll found that “even white Americans without a college degree, considered to be a core constituency of Trump’s base, are split in their approval of the president’s handling, with 50% disapproving and 49% approving, compared to 42% disapproving and 57% approving in that last poll.”
Trump’s Coronavirus approval rating may be the most important number in predicting the 2020 presidential election.
CNN recently pointed out “just how correlated coronavirus is to feelings about the election right now” and noted that “it’s actually more predictive of voting for” former Vice President Joe Biden “than disapproval of Trump’s job performance.”
In the most recent CNN poll, which found that Biden had a 14-point national lead, “among the voters who said Biden would be better at handling the pandemic, 96% said they’d vote for Biden. Trump took a mere 2% of those voters.” Biden also won “92% of those who disapprove of Trump’s overall job performance. Trump won 3% of those voters.”
As CNN noted, this trend has been consistent in numerous other polls. For instance, a recent Pew Research national poll “found that 52% of voters were confident that Biden could deal with coronavirus. Only 41% said the same about Trump.” Biden had a 10-point lead over Trump in that national poll.
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