Lesbian soccer player Megan Rapinoe would beat Trump in 2020, poll finds
Rapinoe, a vocal Trump critic, refused to visit the White House following her World Cup win
Megan Rapinoe, U.S. Women’s Soccer Team member and outspoken Trump critic, would best Donald Trump in a presidential election.
That’s according to a new poll from Public Policy Polling, which found that the openly lesbian soccer player, fresh from winning the Women’s World Cup, gets 42% support versus Trump’s 41%.
Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, said it had conducted the hypothetical match-up due to “popular demand.”
However, PPP noted that the Rapinoe match-up highlights a trend in his poll numbers against Democrats.
PPP polled Trump against eight Democratic candidates for president, and found he consistently polled in the 40-42% range.
“Rapinoe may be an unlikely Presidential candidate but her numbers still speak to a broader truth about Trump’s standing,” the pollster said, “the fact that he polls in the low 40s against any Democrat he gets tested against shows that electability concerns are overrated and Democrats should feel comfortable voting for the candidates they like the best, not just the ones they think have the best chance of beating Trump.”
Rapinoe has been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration, a stance that has put her in the firing line of Trump’s Twitter feed.
Rapinoe had previously said that she would not be “going to the fucking White House” if the women’s team was victorious, causing Trump to tweet back that Rapinoe should “WIN first before she talks!” and urging her to “Finish the job!”
The soccer player stood by those remarks while speaking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper following her team’s World Cup victory, saying she “would not go” to the White House if invited, “and every teammate that I’ve talked to explicitly about it would not go.”
“I don’t think anyone on the team has any interest in lending the platform that we’ve worked so hard to build, and the things that we fight for, and the way that we live our life — I don’t think that we want that to be co-opted or corrupted by this administration,” she said.
Rapinoe said Trump’s message “is excluding people. You’re excluding me, you’re excluding people that look like me, you’re excluding people of color, you’re excluding Americans that maybe support you.”
She said that Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was “harking back to an era that was not great for everyone — it might have been great for a few people, and maybe America is great for a few people right now, but it’s not great for enough Americans in this world.”
Speaking at a post-World Cup celebration parade in New York City, Rapinoe jokingly ruled herself out of the presidential race, telling the crowd there was “no place I’d rather be, not even in a presidential race. I’m busy, I’m sorry.”
She also celebrated the diversity of the Women’s Soccer Team, calling her teammates “so resilient” and “so tough.”
“We have pink hair, purple, hair, tattoos, dreadlocks,” she said. “We got white girls, black girls, and everything in between. Straight girls, gay girls.”
She also gave a direct shout-out to Trump, saying America has “to be better.”
“We have to love more, hate less, listen more, talk less,” she said. “We got to know this is everybody’s responsibility. Its our responsibility to make this world a better place.”
🔊ON for this incredible mic drop from @mPinoe #USWNTParade pic.twitter.com/PuP0TyVpu9
— Planet Fútbol (@si_soccer) July 10, 2019
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