A new Morning Consult poll published Monday found that 26 percent of Democrats want to replace Joe Biden with someone else on their party’s ticket in response to the sexual assault allegations by former staffer Tara Reade.
The poll was taken after respondents were shown a 35-second clip of Biden’s interview with Mika Brzezinski where he publicly responded to the allegations for the first time.
Biden’s response was deemed credible by 61 percent of Democrats, but the issue revealed generational and gender lines: Younger Democrats, at 53 percent, were 14 percentage points less likely than their elders to consider Biden’s answer credible and Democratic men (68 percent) were 12 points more likely than Democratic women to believe Biden.
There is an interesting generational divide on this issue. 40 percent of voters under 45 want the party to pick someone else, while only 15 percent of Democrats older than 45 want to replace Biden.
But this might not be the most interesting part of the poll. In 2017, during the #MeToo movement, 62 percent of Democrats believed that elected officials facing allegations of sexual misconduct should resign. In this poll, which was conducted earlier this month, only 42 percent of Democrats held that view. That’s a stunning 20 percent drop that could just be because of the passage of time, or due to political convenience.
41 percent of voters find Reade’s accusations credible. A similar amount, 38 percent, found Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations credible. Political affiliation clearly impacts the perception of credibility, as only 26 percent of Democrats found Reade’s accusations credible, but 65 percent of Democrats found Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations credible.
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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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