News Desk
Likely Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has not directly responded to the claim by a former Senate staff member that he sexually assaulted her in 1993.
But his campaign repeatedly has denied the incident happened.
A Rasmussen poll released Thursday found not even one in four likely voters believe the denial.
And about one in three believe the claim of Tara Reade, the former Senate employee.
Rasmussen said voters “don’t expect the media to cover the Biden story like they did the allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.”
The telephone and online survey found 34% believe Reade is telling the truth. Only 24% believe the Biden campaign’s denial.
Four of 10 were undecided.
“By comparison, 33% believed Kavanaugh’s main accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, when she first came forward with claims that he sexually assaulted her in high school. Thirty-eight percent (38%) believed Kavanaugh’s denial instead,” Rasmussen said.
Sixty-two percent of voters say they have been following recent news reports about the allegation against Biden, although only 26% have been following “very closely.”
Among voters who have been following very closely, 60% think the accuser is telling the truth, Rasmussen said.
The survey found voters are not surprised that most establishment media outlets have been ignoring the claim.
That is in “stark contrast to the blanket coverage given to Kavanaugh’s accusers during his Senate confirmation hearings. Just 30% think the media is likely to cover the allegation against Biden as much as they did those against Kavanaugh. A plurality (45%) disagrees and says the media is unlikely to cover the Biden story as much.”
The survey of 1,000 likely voters was conducted April 28-29.
Even “21% of voters in his own party don’t think Biden’s telling the truth, although that compares to 48% of Republicans and 36% of unaffiliated voters,” Rasmussen said.
Bongino.com reported the “media has been helping Biden too by omission. While Reade’s allegations have long existed, they didn’t get a second of airtime until audio recently surfaced from a 1993 Larry King Live episode corroborating her story – and a former neighbor and colleague of Reade came forward to lend credibility to her story.”
The report said: “The media doesn’t want to touch the story, and neither does Biden. Common sense would dictate that’s because they know the American public isn’t going to buy Biden’s defense – which already seems to increasingly be the case.”
