Biden leads Trump by 9 points in national poll

A new opinion poll shows that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has a nine percentage-point lead over President Donald Trump nationally with less than three months before the 2020 election.

The NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, released on Sunday, found that 50 percent of registered voters favored Biden while just 41 percent said they would support the Republican incumbent.

Forty-nine percent of participants said the former US vice president was better suited to handle the current health crisis sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, while just 33 percent said the same of Trump.

The survey also showed that Biden leads Trump by 24 percentage points on handling race relations.

The new poll was carried out days after Biden selected Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) to be his running mate.

Thirty-nine percent of voters expressed a positive view about the California senator, while 35 percent said the opposite. Feelings about Harris also created sharp division along party lines, with 71 percent of Biden-backing voters saying they held a positive view of her and just four percent of Trump’s supporters saying the same.

The NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll was conducted from August 9 to 12 among a population of 900 registered voters. The survey has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points.

The opinion poll, published just a day ahead of the start of the Democratic National Convention, comes as national and states polls have continued to show Biden with substantial advantages over Trump in his bid for the White House.

A CNBC poll released last week found the former US vice president leading the incumbent in five of six battleground states, including Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

The decline in national support for Trump can be explained by the president’s chaotic handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has taken a heavy toll on American lives and the economy.

The United States remains the worst-hit country by the pandemic, with over 5.5 million infections and more than 170,000 deaths.

Trump and his administration have been under fire for an untimely relaxing of lockdown measures as well as a blatant disregard for personal protection equipment since the flu-like pathogen erupted in the US early in January.

Moreover, police violence and racial injustice protests that followed the brutal murder of unarmed African American George Floyd in police custody have dealt a heavy blow to the president’s approval rating.

The 46-year-old died after a white officer knelt on his neck and pinned him to the ground for nine minutes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25.

His death unleashed protests against police brutality and for racial justice in the US and many world countries, with protesters saying they were hopeful that Floyd’s death would mark a turning point in race relations and police reform the US.