Following yesterday’s sudden reversal, former Vice President Joe Biden continues to widen the gap as the odds-on favorite to win the U.S. presidency in November.
As we reported yesterday, Biden saw a sudden spike on June 1, seeing him edge ahead of President Donald Trump by a full 2% on the Election Odds Tracker at Bonus.com. Since then that spike has become a vertical leap, with the former vice president now sitting with a 5% lead.
Monday’s surge for Biden can be attributed to several factors. First, the widely perceived mishandling by Trump of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic in which more than 105,000 Americans have so far lost their lives.
Trump also received poor marks for his response to nightly protests in most major U.S. cities and several European ones following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man killed by a white Minneapolis police officer May 25.
Controversy continued to swirl around the president Tuesday, following revelations he had utilized the U.S. Secret Service on Monday to clear peaceful demonstrators away from the White House with tear gas for a frankly bizarre photo op posing with a bible outside a nearby church.
U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) is pressing the Secret Service for documentation and correspondence leading up to the action. In no uncertain terms, Connolly said “The Secret Service is not a tool of fascism nor the guardian of the president’s personal vanity. They cannot be allowed to infringe upon the Constitutional rights of the American people.”
In addition, during a Monday phone call with the nation’s governors, Trump said he was considering deploying the U.S. Military in cities where peaceful daytime protests have given way to violent riots at night. In doing so, Trump would be invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act. A move a U.S. president has not taken since the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of L.A.P.D. officers caught assaulting motorist Rodney King on video. However, in that case the act was invoked as a targeted activation intended to suppress a specific incident in a specific location, not a blanket deployment of armed forces anywhere in the U.S. he sees fit. Trump was broadly criticized for the statement.
It has certainly been a wild week in the Trump presidency, and the odds are reflecting the upheaval. We will be closely monitoring developments in the day ahead and seeing what happens with Biden’s lead.
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