Election Day Is Less Than Six Months Away And Trump’s Poll Numbers Are Slumping Amid Protests, Pandemic Deaths

• President Donald Trump is under water against former Vice President Joe Biden as the coronavirus pandemic, protests and economic downturn threatens to derail Trump’s re-election bid ahead of the November elections, polls show.
• Biden is leading Trump in Michigan, where the state’s citizens disapprove of his response to the pandemic, an EPIC-MRA poll published Sunday shows. 
• Trump’s electoral fortunes could turn around if the unemployment rate, which skyrocketed during the coronavirus pandemic, continues dropping as governors and mayors ease up on their stay at home orders. 

President Donald Trump’s poll numbers are slipping less than six months outside of the election while former Vice President Joe Biden is seeing his support rise amid a stubborn pandemic and growing protests over the death of George Floyd.

Roughly 55% of people in a CNN poll published Monday said they would vote for the Democrat’s presumptive nominee while only 41% said the same for Trump, who famously shocked pollsters after he defeated former Secretary of Hillary Clinton in a close presidential election in 2016. The CNN poll is not an outlier.

An NPR poll published on June 5 shows Trump’s approval rating sitting at 41%, which is down 2 points since the last time NPR measured the president’s overall approval rating in March. His overall disapproval number jumped 5 points to 55%, NPR’s poll shows. Biden is leading the president, 50% to 43%, in that poll as well.

CNN’s poll surveyed 1,200 people and was conducted between June 2 – 5, while NPR’s poll surveyed 1,062 adults between June 2 – 3 and carries a margin of error at 3.8 percentage points. NPR notes that the poll includes an oversample of nonwhite voters.

A Monmouth University poll published on June 3 also shows Trump trailing the former vice president. Biden has the support of 52% of registered voters over Trump, who has the support of 41%, according to the Monmouth poll. The former vice president’s lead stood at 50% to 41% in May, 48% to 44% in April, and 48% to 45% in March.

“The race continues to be largely a referendum on the incumbent. The initial reaction to ongoing racial unrest in the country suggests that most voters feel Trump is not handling the situation all that well,” Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, said in a statement attached to the poll.

The polls coincide with nationwide demonstrations against the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died May 25 after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly 9 minutes, a video of the incident shows. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was immediately fired after the incident and faces second-degree murder and manslaughter charges.

All three polls show the president underwater on racial issues.

Nearly 67% of people polled in the NPR survey said Trump has mostly increased racial tensions, while only 18% of people in the poll suggested he’s decreased tensions, including 41% of Republicans. The CNN poll shows that 31% of people surveyed approve of Trump’s handling of racial issues while 63% disapprove.

In addition to heightened racial tensions, critics have also lashed out at Trump over his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in China before spreading to the United States, where it has killed a reported 110,000 people. City officials across the country tried slowing the virus through stay at home orders, which subsequently resulted in tens of millions of lost jobs.

The pandemic has hurt the president’s poll numbers in the battleground state of Michigan, too. Nearly 60% of Michiganders in an EPIC-MRA survey published Sunday give Trump a negative rating on his handling of the virus pandemic, while 41% of people in the survey gave him a positive rating. Biden is leading the president in Michigan, 53-41.

Trump narrowly won Michigan in 2016 despite trailing Clinton in March and August of that year by 10 points, 47-37 and 46-36, respectively, according to EPIC-MRA polls at the time.

Recent employment numbers could lead an uptick in Trump’s fortunes if poll numbers are any indication.

The unemployment rate, which was at its highest peak since the World War II era, saw a drop from 14.7% in April to 13.3% in May, according to FOX News. Employers added 2.5 million jobs in May, media reports show, setting a record for the largest monthly increase in new jobs in history.

Voters trust the president on the economy more than Biden by a 3-point margin, according to a Fox News poll published in May.