With less than 100 days until the November 2020 Presidential Election, things are not looking up for current-President Trump as his numbers continue to plummet in the polls. In addition to the already millions of Americans who disliked Trump from the beginning, due in part to his handling of the Coronavirus outbreak, more and more people are turning their backs on him.
According to FiveThirtyEight.com which outlines all of the major polls in America, Biden is winning in a majority of polls. However, the polls become more intriguing once you look at some of the states which are pulling ahead. In North Carolina, for example, based on a Marist College poll -- which has an A+ rating -- has Biden ahead of Trump by about seven points. Another general poll by AP-NORC has Biden ahead of Trump by 12 points. AP-NORC, in addition, gave President Trump a 38% approval rating. To compare, the last time that a President’s approval rating was lower was George H.W. Bush’s polls in 1993 with an abysmal 30.7%.
But what does this really mean with Biden pulling ahead? Some Democrats are weary about Biden’s lead in the polls based on the results of the 2016 election. At this point in 2016, Hillary Clinton was ahead in the polls AND these same polls were determined that she was going to take it. According to Vox, there have been multiple mistakes these ‘pollsters,’ those who run the polls, made four years ago to more accurately predict the upcoming election. One of the ways to fix this pole is to weigh the polls properly by education in order to reflect the actual electorate.
At the same time, it is difficult to compare the two situations. Trump, now having gone through most of his first term, has the challenge of trying to win over people who had given him a chance this time around. In addition, Trump’s presidency is facing the challenge of having to deal with not only a pandemic, but also the Black Lives Matter Movement. But as mentioned before, a majority of people do not approve in the slightest of how he has been handling the situation.
The major key in determining Trump’s fate lies in the states that have gone red for decades which are now showing signs of voting blue this Fall. In Florida, a state that has 29 electoral college votes, Trump has not led a single poll since early March. This is important as “no Republican has won the presidency without Florida since Calvin Coolidge in 1924.”
With that in mind, the Republican Party has been losing support amongst women voters over a period of time. This comes directly into play with Representive Ted Yoho’s comment calling Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “f*cking bitch” and her electrifying, female-empowered response, as well as Trump’s tweet ‘marshalling’ “The Suburban Housewives of America.” Trump’s language has been consistently sexist for decades and has been slowly causing some women to shy away from the Republican party such as when he declared the #MeToo Movement was a “very scary time” for men, or his repeated sexism against women who opposed him. In a recent poll by Washington Post-ABC News, Joe Biden was leading among women by 25 points, while some had this number even greater.
Women make up 50.8% of the population in the United States. This means that they can have an exponential impact on the results of the election. With that in mind, there is still so much time between now and the election, but in reality it is really not that much. The Presidential Election is less than 100 days away and only then we will see how the people vote. The only way to make a difference is to go out and vote on November 3rd.