Most people across the country remember that during the 2016 presidential election, polls declared that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would win the White House in a landslide. As you might expect, the folks who conducted those surveys have been trying to regain their standing ever since.
With that in mind, the Washington Post and ABC News began 2020 by releasing their first poll on how people view the upcoming national contest, and the survey indicates that President Trump “is in better shape than he was last fall” due to rising approval for his handling of the economy.
According to an article released by the Post on Monday and written by Polling Director Scott Clement and Chief Correspondent Dan Balz, the results “pose a challenge for Democratic presidential candidates who have criticized the President’s policies and focused their economic messaging on inequities between the richest Americans and everyone else.”
The Post connected all of this to impeachment — and not in a way that Democrats and liberals in the media might assume:
The improvement in his job approval rating in this poll — to 44 percent, an increase of six percentage points since fall — coincides with the Senate impeachment trial, which has further polarized the country. Whether it represents a lasting shift in Trump’s favor has obvious political implications, given the stakes in the election year.
In addition, the candidates have concentrated on ways of “alleviating the financial struggles of many families who are dealing with rising health-care, child-care or educational costs.”
Even though citizens have concerns “that the economic system favors the wealthy,” the survey still found that “fewer than half are worried about maintaining their own standard of living, a shift from 2016, when most expressed concern about losing their financial footing,” the reporters noted.
The Post writers also declared:
With just over nine months until Election Day, Americans see Trump as a slight favorite for reelection, with 49 percent expecting him to win and 43 percent predicting that his Democratic challenger will prevail.
But those expectations are highly partisan, with 87 percent of Republicans saying they believe Trump will win reelection while a somewhat smaller 78 percent majority of Democrats say they believe their party’s nominee will win.
The national survey dealt with six potential general election matchups and found that registered voters are roughly split between supporting the President and backing Democratic candidates. Neither Trump nor Democrats hold a statistically significant advantage in any matchup.
As you might expect, Americans are still divided on Trump’s removal from office via impeachment, while among the broader population of all voting-age adults, most Democrats “maintain at least slight advantages over Trump.”
The survey of non-voters found that wealthy candidates Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg lead Trump by eight percentage points, while Joe Biden is ahead by seven points. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar hold slighter five-point advantages over Trump, while Peter Buttigieg is roughly even with 46 percent to Trump’s 45 percent.
Bloomberg and Klobuchar were not tested against Trump in that earlier survey, the reporters stated.
Clement and Balz also noted that the results from the new poll “represent a contrast with an October Post-ABC poll in which Biden, Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg all held double-digit advantages over the incumbent Republican.”
