New Fox poll paints bleak picture for Trump’s electoral hopes

A new poll from President Donald Trump’s formerly favourite television news network, Fox News, provides a sobering glimpse at the president’s popularity in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and a bleak outlook for his re-election chances in the November general election.

The poll, conducted between May 17 and 20 and released on Thursday, suggests that Trump’s support among two critical groups of voters – independents and older voters – has cratered in recent weeks.

Self-described independents say they support the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, by 13 percentage points over the incumbent Trump, and voters over the age of 65 support Biden by 17 points. The latter group is particularly troubling for the president as older voters are consistently the most reliable when it comes to turning out to vote on election day.

In the 2016 election, Trump won independents by four percentage points and seniors by seven percentage points.

Overall, the poll of 1,207 randomly chosen voters across the US suggests that more people trust Biden on issues such as healthcare and the coronavirus by wide margins, while slightly more – three percent – say they trust the president on issues related to the economy.

The polls come just one day after another survey, by Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, has Biden ahead of Trump 50 percent to 39 percent among registered voters nationwide. The figure is up slightly from the 49 – 41 percent lead enjoyed by Biden in an April 8 poll. In the same poll, Trump’s approval rating slipped from 45 percent in April to 42 percent in May.

The Fox poll also suggests that Biden’s supporters are more enthusiastic about the election than Trump supporters, with 69 percent of them saying they feel extremely motivated to vote compared to 63 percent of Trump voters who say they feel the same.

New Fox poll paints bleak picture for Trump’s electoral hopes, Aljazeera, May 25