Former U.S. vice-president Joe Biden has been careful not to rule out a 2020 presidential run. And a new poll shows that he may have what it takes to win — or at least beat current U.S. President Donald Trump.
A Politico-Morning Consult poll revealed that 35 per cent of voters would re-elect Trump in 2020, while Biden would get 46 per cent of votes. The remainder were undecided. But Politico noted that while the results are in Biden’s favour, voters were more likely to vote for a generic Democrat candidate over the 74-year-old.
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Eighty-six per cent of Democrats said they would vote for a Democrat candidate over Trump. But 78 per cent of Democrats said they would vote for Biden over Trump.
“Former vice-president Joe Biden has the upper hand in a hypothetical matchup against President Donald Trump, but he underperforms compared with a generic Democrat,” Kyle Dropp, Morning Consult’s chief researcher, said.
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News that he would probably beat Trump may not be surprising to Biden himself, who has said that he could have done it in 2016.
“I had a lot of data and I was fairly confident that if I were the Democratic Party‘s nominee, I had a better than even chance of being president,” he told a crowd at Colgate University in March 2017.
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The poll comes as Biden is in the news for saying he may run for president. In October, he refused to rule out the possibility in an interview with Vanity Fair.
“I haven’t decided to run, but I’ve decided I’m not going to decide not to run,” he told Vanity Fair. “We’ll see what happens.”
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But he later flip-flopped on the issue, again. Earlier in November, he told Good Luck America that he wasn’t sure whether running for office is the “appropriate” thing to do.
“We gotta turn this ship around,” Biden said during the interview. “I’d much prefer to be helping someone turn it around than being the guy trying to turn it around.”
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Biden has already had two unsuccessful runs for president in the 1988 and 2008 elections. He considered running in the 2016 election, but changed his mind after the death of his son, Beau, in 2015.
In an interview with Good Morning America last year, Biden spoke about the difficult decision.
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“No one should ever seek the presidency unless they’re able to devote their whole heart and soul and passion into just doing that,” he said. “And, Beau was my soul. I just wasn’t ready to be able to do that. But, so, my one regret is my Beau’s not here. I don’t have any other regrets.”
In his new book, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose, leaves the door open for a future swing at president.
The Politico/Morning Consult poll was completed between Nov. 9-11 by 1,993 registered U.S. voters. The poll is considered accurate plus or minus 2 percentage points.
— With a file from The Associated Press
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