Buyer's Remorse Setting in as Cuomo Ties Biden in Dem Presidential Poll
Former Vice President Joe Biden has, somehow, managed to outlast more than two dozen other Democratic presidential candidates to become the party’s presumptive 2020 nominee.
Biden has done so despite his countless head-scratching gaffes, advanced age and unclear policy positions that seem to shift depending upon the daily direction of the political winds.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, may still technically be in the race, but no one truly thinks he still has a shot at the nomination.
Unfortunately for Democrats, with the primary season more than halfway over — and many states’ primaries indefinitely postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic — left-leaning voters don’t really have any options left aside from a walking gaffe machine and an avowed democratic socialist.
Enter Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose political stock has risen sharply over the past month as he’s received endless daily media coverage thanks in large part to his news conferences detailing how New York is handling the public health crisis — all while Biden remains confined to broadcasting nonsensical video messages from his home’s basement.
In what could be termed as “buyer’s remorse” for many Democrats, rumors have begun to circulate that Cuomo would fare better in the general election against President Donald Trump than Biden would, and perhaps even make a better president than Biden.
Now, a new poll from Rasmussen has shown that likely Democratic voters — and more broadly, likely voters overall — are pretty evenly split on the matter.
Between April 2 and 5, the pollsters at Rasmussen surveyed 1,000 likely voters and, reporting a margin of error around 3 percent, sought to determine which of those two Democratic politicians voters believe would make a better nominee.
Among likely Democratic voters, Biden prevailed over Cuomo by only a single point, 46 percent to 45 percent, with 9 percent remaining undecided. Since that is within the margin of error, the results can be seen as a virtual tie.
A similar result was reached when the pollsters asked all respondents, regardless of party, the same question. Biden and Cuomo were deadlocked at 38 percent, while 24 percent of the remaining respondents expressed uncertainty between the two.
In a hypothetical Democratic matchup between the two, Rasmussen reported that Biden and Cuomo were essentially tied among both men and women.
The only clear disparities that arose were age-related — younger voters tended to prefer Cuomo while older respondents stuck with Biden — and along racial lines, as Biden took the majority of black voters while Cuomo garnered majority support from white voters and other minorities.
Cuomo also earned the majority preference of independent voters unaffiliated with either party.
As previously noted, Cuomo’s political stock has surged in recent weeks over his handling of the coronavirus crisis in New York.
Fifty-three percent of all likely voters surveyed by Rasmussen said they viewed Cuomo favorably (25 percent “very” favorably) while 33 percent rated him unfavorably (14 percent “very” unfavorably).
Compare that to the ratings Cuomo received just about a year and a half ago, in August 2018, when the governor had a combined favorability rating of only 29 percent.
It is worth pointing that the 2018 poll was conducted around the same time that Cuomo, in opposition to Trump’s oft-repeated “Make America Great Again” slogan, suggested that “we’re not going to make American great again. It was never that great.”
To be sure, Cuomo is still taking shots at Trump from time to time, though his critiques have surprisingly also been intermingled with moments of praise for the president and his administration’s handling of the current crisis.
Biden, meanwhile, from the secluded basement of his Delaware home, has been incessantly critical of Trump, spreading fake news while trying to ignore the Obama administration’s failures when it came to dealing with the 2009-10 H1N1 pandemic.
It was already pretty clear that Biden was a terrible candidate when he first entered the race about a year ago, and that reality has only become all the more obvious since then.
If Democrats truly are experiencing “buyer’s remorse” in regard to Biden being the presumptive nominee, they’d better hurry up and decide if they want to exchange him for another candidate, like Cuomo, before it is too late.
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