Poll: One in Four Democrats Support Replacing Biden After Viewing His Denial of Sexual Assault Allegation

Roughly one quarter of Democrats would support replacing former Vice President Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominees after having watched his public denial of the sexual assault allegation made against him by a former Senate aide.

According to a new Morning Consult poll, 26% of the self-identified Democrats surveyed said they would “definitely” or “probably” want a new Democratic nominee. More than six in ten (61%) party supporters said they did not want Biden to drop out. (One in eight had no opinion.) The exact same percentage of Democrats found his denial to be “somewhat” or “very” credible, while 19% did not believe Biden’s unequivocal claim that “it never, never happened.”

Male Democrats mirrored the overall numbers of those wanting Biden to step down with 24%, while two out of three wanted him to remain the party’s standard bearer. The results for women weren’t substantially different, with 28% in favor of the party picking a different nominee, with 60% supported Biden.

Most notably, Democratic voters under 45 were much more likely to support replacing Biden — fully four out of 10 wanted the party to pick someone else, nearly the same number — 42% — that backed Biden.

For context, one out of eight Republicans wanted then-candidate Donald Trump to drop out of the 2016 race after the infamous Access Hollywood tape was released, in which Trump could be heard boasting about having sexually assaulted women — a claim he later apologized for as “locker room talk.” But that bombshell came just one month before Election Day, with little recourse for the party to replace the top of the ticket so late in the election cycle. However, more than a dozen prominent Republican figures publicly disavowed their support of Trump after the Access Hollywood tape, the kind of high-profile party defections that Biden has not experienced so far.