Biden Starts To Brag and Boast After Polls Give Him an Early Lead
Among the roughly two dozen Democrats seeking their party’s nomination to take on President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden has emerged as the clear front-runner among the pack of would-be presidents.
Biden has consistently out-polled his competitors and the predominantly liberal establishment media has gleefully shared various polls that show Biden is even besting Trump with comfortable margins in a number of key states — and it would appear that the media hype has gone straight to Biden’s head.
CNN‘s Chris Cillizza actually offered up something of a cautionary analysis of the supposed massive leads Biden has over Trump in a handful of polls and states, which recently prompted the former vice president to boldly predict that he would easily win a number of red states that Trump won in 2016.
While addressing the moderator and crowd at the Poor People’s Moral Action Congress in Washington on Monday, Biden brazenly predicted, “If I’m your nominee, I’m winning Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, believe it or not, and I believe we can win Texas and Florida.”
“Look at the polling there now. … I have no intention of walking away,” he added.
It’s the kind of cockiness that has marked pretty much all of Biden’s public life — despite his numerous, well-documented gaffes.
Surprisingly, Cillizza proceeded to throw some precautious cold water on Biden’s fired-up prediction and noted that only former President Barack Obama managed to run a successful Democratic campaign in Florida in 2008 and 2012 and North Carolina in 2008. Otherwise, Republicans have owned those states in the past five presidential elections.
Furthermore, Trump won all five of those states in 2016 and — outside of his 1 percent victory in Florida — by fairly comfortable margins.
Trump won North Carolina by 3 percent and Georgia by 5 percent, Cillizza wrote. In Texas, he won by 9 percent; in South Carolina, it was 14 percent. Those last two would be tough for anyone to completely wipe out or reversed.
Cillizza noted that if Biden were somehow able to pull off an upset victory in each one of those five red states, as well as swing Michigan and Pennsylvania back into the blue state stable, the former vice president would have shifted 143 Electoral College votes away from Trump, and, assuming the remainder of the 2016 electoral map stayed the same, would win a landslide victory with 375 electoral votes, more than even Obama earned in either of his two electoral victories.
In the end, while Cillizza suggested that “anything is possible” in the era of Trump, he nevertheless was resigned to dismiss Biden’s bold prediction as “very, very unlikely.”
As “unlikely” as it would be for Biden to flip one or more of those five red states he predicted he’d win, the assumption that he will automatically be able to also flip Michigan and Pennsylvania — as well as Wisconsin — from red to blue also appears to be a tough sell, according to The Hill.
A new survey of voters in those three crucial states suggests it is not a given at all that Biden would be capable of easily defeating Trump. That survey, prepared by Firehouse Strategies and the Optimus data analytics firm, showed that Trump has actually made significant gains on Biden in those states as compared to a previous survey conducted three months ago.
In Wisconsin, Biden led Trump by 12 points in March, but that lead has now shrunk to only 6 points. In Michigan, Biden holds a 3-point lead over Trump — within the margin of error — while Biden’s lead over Trump in Pennsylvania is just one solitary percentage point, essentially rendering that state a toss-up.
An interesting aside that was uncovered by that recent survey was that when it came to having an enthusiastic and solid “base” of voters, Trump was actually doing far better than his potential Democratic opponents or the absurd media narrative that dismisses the strength of his base of support.
Trump’s “base” ranged from 37 percent of voters in Wisconsin to 39 percent in Michigan and 42 percent in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, the “base” for Democrats fluctuated between candidates and states, and only reached 32 percent in Wisconsin and Michigan while dropping to an astonishing 24 percent in Pennsylvania.
On top of all of that, despite Trump being “underwater” in terms of his job approval rating among voters in all three states, a majority of voters in those states nevertheless rejected the idea of Congress pursuing impeachment of Trump based on the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
To be sure, the 2020 election will almost certainly be a close-fought battle featuring enthusiastic voters on both sides of the divide, and Trump’s re-election is far from assured.
As Cillizza noted, anything is possible.
That said, things currently are shaping up in Trump’s favor and Biden’s bold prediction of an Electoral College wipeout seems far more delusional than believable.
