Former vice president Joe Biden (wearing purple tie), the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, and President Donald Trump, a Republican real estate mogul seeking reelection in 2020, recent polls showing that Biden is ahead of the president both in Ohio and nationwide
By Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief. Coleman is an experienced Black political reporter who covered the 2008 presidential election for the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio and the presidential elections in 2012 and 2016 at Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com.
CLEVELANDURBANNEWS.COM-CLEVELAND, Ohio –As the 2020 election nears, incumbent president Donald Trump is losing to Democratic front-runner Joe Biden in Ohio by eight points, 50-42 percent, and women, Independent voters and Black voters pushed the former vice president over the top, a hypothetical Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday found, the poll with a 3.2 percent margin of error.
A former U.S. senator turned vice president who served under Barack Obama, the country's first Black president, Biden, through Obama, and otherwise, has inroads to the Black community, segregationists ties aside.
The other Democratic contenders in the top tier are each locked in a dead heat with the president for Ohio in 2020, the independent Quinnipiac poll found.
It is as follows:
- 46 percent for Trump to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders with 45 percent;
- 46 percent For Trump to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 45 percent;
- 44 - 44 percent between Trump and California Sen. Kamala Harris;
- 44 - 44 percent between Trump and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg;
- 44 percent for Trump to 43 percent for New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker.
And while 58 percent of 1,431 likely Ohio surveyed in the poll say they are better off financially since 2016 when Trump was first elected, Obama supporters argue and data show that the nation's first Black president, who left office in 2017 after serving two terms, laid the groundwork for the so-called growing economy.
That poll, and salver others, also found that 43 percent of Ohioans disapprove of the president's overall job performance.
Ohio is a pivotal state for presidential elections that Trump won in 2016 and Obama won in both 2008 and 2012, and no Democrat has ever won the White House without first winning Ohio, and neither has any Republican of remembrance.
The president lags behind Biden,76, and all of the top Democratic contenders in a 2020 match-up for the general election, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, Biden leading by eight points. Sanders by five, Warren by five points, and Harris is in a dead heat with Trump.
When the president kicked off his reelection campaign last month in the battleground state of Florida GOP leaders were skeptical about his poll numbers then, polls that found him trailing in virtually every swing state, including Florida, North Carolina and Michigan, states he carried in 2016.
At least least one GOP-commissioned poll at that time showed the president could win Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2020, states he also carried in 2016, among others.
That is now in question.
Battleground states determine electoral votes, and electoral votes determine winners of presidential elections
The Black vote is overwhelming handed to Democratic presidential candidates whose rhetoric on jobs, the economy, education and health care appeals more to the traditional Black voter.
A Republican real estate mogul who upset Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win the presidency in a close election in 2016 where he won the electoral college and Clinton won the popular vote, Trump, 73, cannot afford to alienate any ethic group anymore that he has already done.
There is no question that Black votes matter.
The Black vote fell seven percentage points in 2016 with Blacks making up 12 percent of the electorate that year, and some four million Obama voters stayed home, an indication that courting the Black vote in 2020 may take some hard work and grassroots campaigning for both Democratic and Republican candidates for president.
The president's diminishing popularity comes has his foes demand he be impeached, though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, amid opposition from some Democratic congressional lawmakers such as Reps Marcia Fudge and Tim Ryan of Ohio, Ryan also a long-shot presidential candidate, says impeachment would be a distraction, and that Democrats should focus more on winning in 2020.
Pelosi has said publicly that she prefers that the president "be imprisoned."
The growing desire for impeachment, with national polls showing that nearly a quarter of Americans approve of it as well as nearly two-thirds of the 225 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, mainly Democrats, also spells trouble for the president.
The recent controversy regarding Trump and his administration follows the release of the Mueller report, the official report documenting the findings and conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 United States presidential election.
Muller testified before two sessions of congress on Wednesday, saying the president was not exonerated without saying much more, the former special counsel upsetting both congressional Republicans and Democrats.
The president is obviously in political trouble.
It did not help that the president has picked a fight with four freshman congresswomen, all of them women of color.
Specifically, he created a fury last week by demanding that U.S. Reps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan go home to the countries they came from, all but Omar, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen who came to America with her U.S. born parents as a child refugee, born in the U.S..
He intensified his attacks on the federal lawmakers Sunday, saying in a tweet that the four members of the congressional quartet now dubbed 'the quad' are "incapable of loving our country.”
Democratic members of congress, 2020 presidential candidates and world leaders have also lashed out at the president for his flagrant attacks on the four congresswomen of color, longtime Congressman John Lewis of Georgia calling Trump racist and an outright embarrassment to the American people.
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, Ohio's most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog with some 5 million views on Google Plus alone.Tel: (216) 659-0473 and Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief, and who trained for 17 years at the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview, CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.
