Trump doesn’t see a sympathy bump as Biden’s poll lead widens

WASHINGTON – Voters appear to be unmoved by President Donald Trump’s bout with COVID-19, with early polls showing no “sympathy boost” for the ailing president amid poor reviews for his debate performance last week.

Instead, Democrat Joe Biden is surging in national polls and now has his biggest lead since late July.

It can generally take a week for major developments in the race to be reflected in the polls, but early evidence is that voters are largely unsympathetic to Trump’s illness.

Two-thirds of likely voters in a Reuters/ipsos poll said Trump wouldn’t have been infected with the coronavirus if he had taken the disease more seriously – numbers all the more lopsided considering that 9% are skeptical he ever had the virus at all.

Previous presidents have gotten a short-term boost in the polls following serious medical issues. Dwight Eisenhower’s approval rating shot up from an already high 71% to 78% when he had a heart attack in September 1955 – the highest for any peacetime president in modern history except for John F. Kennedy. Ronald Reagan also got an 11-point bump following the assassination attempt in 1981.

The difference is that those were unforeseen events, said B. Dan

Wood, a Texas A&M University professor who has studied presidential approval during crises. Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis comes seven months into a pandemic that the president has acknowledged downplaying. And he has belittled people, like Biden, who wear protective gear.

“Trump’s COVID is totally expected, given his behavior. No one should be surprised,” Wood said. “Eisenhower’s heart attacks and Reagan’s assassination attempt injury were shocks because they were not expected.”

Only 7% of registered voters in a Yahoo/yougov poll described Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis as a “wake-up call,” but they were mostly Republican.

Among Democrats, 84% said they were already treating the coronavirus more seriously than the president, while 53% of

Republicans described the diagnosis as simply bad luck for the president and not indicative of greater risk, according to the Yahoo poll.

Biden now leads by 9.1 percentage points in the Realclearpolitics average of polls – a lead 3 points larger than Hillary Clinton had at the same point in 2016. Biden also remains above 50%, giving Trump little opportunity to change the race by winning over undecided voters.