Biden is poised to win the Illinois primary. Are Trump voters worried about November?
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s momentum shows no signs of slowing in Illinois, according to area political scientists and new polling.
Building on wins in four states last week that all but shuttered Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign, Biden goes into the March 17 primary with a lead his opponent is unlikely to overcome.
Biden enjoys a substantial edge in a new poll from Emerson College in Boston, which shows him winning 57% of likely primary voters. Sanders follows at 36%.
Though voters were split on which Democrat offered the best health care policy, they said the most important factor in their choice was a candidate who can beat President Donald Trump.
A forecast from opinion polling website FiveThirtyEight estimates Biden will win 62% of the vote. The site’s outlook for Sanders was grim: The senator has a 1% chance of winning in Illinois.
With Biden looking so strong, many Illinois political professionals are already turning their attention to a fall campaign pitting Biden against Trump.
If Biden secures the nomination, the competition will be stiff for Trump in November, said Kent Redfield, a retired political science professor at the University of Illinois Springfield.
“There’s a credible path to victory for both Biden and Trump,” he said.
Biden might also appeal to moderate voters looking for a Trump alternative.
“The moderate middle will ultimately decide the outcome as it almost always does,” said John Jackson, a visiting professor at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute. “Biden will be way better than Sanders, a democratic socialist. That would’ve been too easy for the Republicans.”
Support for the president remains strong in places like Wayne County, where Trump won 84% of the vote in 2016. (Although Democrat Hillary Clinton, an Illinois native, won the state with 55 percent of the vote).
Ron Woodrow, Republican party chairman there, says he still expects it to be a close race.
“I don’t expect Trump voters from 2016 to vacate their vote for him and vote for Biden,” said Woodrow, a 63-year-old retired farmer. “We weren’t sure what we were getting with him, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised by how he has conducted his presidency.”
Trump’s pro-fossil fuel policies are popular in the southeastern part of the state, where the oil industry once flourished but has “gone down somewhat” since the fracking boom sent prices plummeting, Woodrow said.
Voters invested in the energy industry of Wayne County aren’t ready to embrace “a socialist society,” he added.
“I think (Democrats) realize that Sanders’ ideology is just not electable throughout the whole country,” Woodrow said. “As a Republican, I think, ‘Well, who’s going to pay for all this? We’re far enough in debt now and we don’t need any more.”
While some Republicans may prefer that Trump run against Sanders, even a more moderate nominee like Biden will send supporters to the polls in force, Woodrow predicted. He cited lingering outrage over the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, which voted to impeach the president in January.
“If everything the Democrats have been doing against Trump to bring him down continues, it’s going to instill the fact that everybody wants to vote for Trump,” Woodrow said.
‘Not exactly Winston Churchill’
If Biden goes on from Illinois to secure the nomination, Trump’s campaign will attack the former vice president’s speaking gaffes, accuse him of senility, and question his health, Jackson said.
But Republicans may pursue that strategy at their peril.
“When it comes to coherence, Trump is not exactly Winston Churchill,” Jackson added, and at 73, Trump is only four years younger than Biden.
Republicans acknowledge Trump’s speaking style leaves room for improvement.
“One thing I’ve always told people,” Woodrow said, “is pay attention to what Trump says at the beginning of the paragraph. After that he always tends to put his foot in his mouth. ... Sometimes he just needs to stop. Don’t add to it.”
Biden has his own difficulties with eloquence, said Laurie Rice, a political science professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
“We’ll see some focus on Biden because he doesn’t always speak the most precisely, especially when it’s off-the-cuff remarks,” Rice said.
Republicans will continue to talk about Biden’s son, Hunter, who served on the board of Ukranian gas company Burisma Holdings. GOP lawmakers and the White House have pushed an investigation into Hunter Biden’s connection to the company.
“This will become like Benghazi was for Clinton,” Jackson said. “There were seven different investigations into Benghazi and seven different times they tried to pin it on Clinton. I think we’re going to see something like that with Biden’s son.”
This story was originally published March 13, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
