A Morning Consult/Politico poll shows former Vice-President Joe Biden leading President Donald Trump by 42% to 34%. But that is a poll of registered voters, which always skews Democrat, often by double digits.
More realistic in reflecting actual results are polls of likely voters.
But 18 months before Election Day, there are no polls of likely voters. Pollsters don’t know which voters are likely to vote this far out. Which makes the poll less than meaningless.
In May 1983, a Gallup poll showed then Sen. John Glenn beating President Reagan for reelection in 1984 by much more, 54% to 37%, a 17-point margin.
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President Reagan shaking hands with John Glenn, 1986. Image courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Library[/caption]
At that point in 1983, the eventual Democrat nominee Walter Mondale was leading Reagan by 49 to 43 per cent. Reagan ultimately won in 1984 in one of the most shocking landslides in American history with 59 per cent of the vote, taking every state except Mondale’s home state of Minnesota.
Trump’s approval rating in Gallup’s tracking poll at 45 per cent is the same as President Obama’s at this point in his Presidency. Higher than Reagan’s in 1983, only 2 points less than Clinton’s in 1994. In Rasmussen’s more Republican-friendly poll, Trump’s approval rating recently peaked at over 50 per cent.
In Rasmussen’s more Republican-friendly poll, Trump’s approval rating recently peaked at over 50 per cent.
Biden’s polling numbers at this point just reflect name ID. At age 76, he has served in national office for close to 50 years. He would be the oldest person ever elected President at 78, serving as President into his 80s. Would the older Biden reflect the same dynamism as Trump?
More important is what would Biden’s economic policies be, and how would they stack up against President Trump’s?
Trump won by appealing to working people, the original backbone of the Democratic Party, who were disappointed with the long-term stagnation economic policies of President Obama.
Economic growth for Obama’s entire 8 years as President, when Biden served as Vice-President, averaged less than 2 per cent.
Economic growth for Obama’s entire 8 years as President, when Biden served as Vice-President, averaged less than 2 per cent.
How would Biden’s policies be any different? Would working people really want to go back to those Obama years? Hillary Clinton lost promising to keep the same policies as Obama.
President Trump has followed Presidents Reagan and Kennedy, with sweeping tax cuts for every taxpayer, deregulation, particularly for energy, where America now leads the world in oil production, and production of natural gas. The economy boomed from the day Trump was elected, reaching 3 per cent growth in 2017, and 4 per cent in 2018, which Obama apologists said was not possible.
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President Barack Obama, with Vice President Joe Biden, 2013[/caption]
With that booming recovery, over 5 million new jobs have been created since Trump was elected, with more jobs now available than the number of people unemployed. Black unemployment has now fallen lower than at any time in American history. Hispanic unemployment has as well. Unemployment among women is now the lowest in 50 years.
Trump’s market-based policies have consequently produced the most inclusive recovery in American history.
How would Biden change those policies? Would he raise taxes, as Mondale proposed, threatening a return to recession and Obama’s slow growth? Or would he win the nomination as the only Democrat not proposing to raise taxes sharply?
These working people were explicitly abandoned in 2012 by Obama/Biden for their more hip rainbow coalition.
The fundamental issue in politics today is the realignment of working people from their former base in the Democrat Party to Trump’s Republican Party.
These working people were explicitly abandoned in 2012 by Obama/Biden for their more hip rainbow coalition.
That is why today’s Democrats stand instead for Socialism, the Green New Deal, abandoning America’s new world-leading oil and gas industries and the resulting manufacturing jobs resulting from low-cost energy, Reparations, abortion in the fourth trimester, and LGBTQ grandstanding.
With Trump delivering on his economic promises, will these workers want to go back to the already failed socialism lite of Obama/Biden?
