Trump's Bout With COVID-19 Might Be Hurting His Reelection Chances
It’s been exactly one week since we learned that President Trump had tested positive for COVID-19. While it’s still hard to know what effect his diagnosis has had on the race, we do have some new polls to share; they don’t necessarily paint a consistent picture, though.
As my colleagues Geoffrey Skelley and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux wrote on Monday, polls conducted in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s diagnosis found that an overwhelming majority of Americans believed that Trump did not take the proper precautions to avoid getting sick. Newer polling agrees: For instance, CNN/SSRS found that 63 percent of Americans thought Trump acted irresponsibly in risking the health of the people around him. However, it’s not clear that this affected people’s perceptions of whether Trump could continue to govern effectively. Sixty-six percent of respondents in the poll said they weren’t concerned about the government’s ability to operate while Trump was ill.
There is some evidence, though, that Trump’s illness may be hurting his reelection chances. SurveyUSA was in the field with a national poll from Oct. 1 (before Trump announced his diagnosis) to Oct. 4 (when Trump was in the hospital), and the pollster found that Joe Biden led Trump by just 4 points in interviews conducted before Trump was hospitalized. But in interviews after Trump’s hospitalization, Biden led by 16 points. A Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald poll identified a similar pattern: Biden led by 5 points in interviews conducted before Trump’s diagnosis and by a shocking 21 points in interviews after it.
But not every poll showed this shift. Monmouth University, one of the best pollsters in the business, was also in the field with a Pennsylvania survey late last week, and it found that the horse race largely did not change after Trump’s diagnosis. Biden led by 12 points in interviews on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 and by 13 points in interviews from Oct. 2 to Oct. 4. Civiqs/Daily Kos, polling just after Trump’s diagnosis, asked a detailed question about how “anything in the news or in [their] daily life” might affect people’s votes, but they found that essentially no one was changing their minds.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-bout-with-covid-19-might-be-hurting-his-reelection-chances/