Voters see Biden as more moderate than Trump, suggesting his attacks that Biden is a 'Trojan horse' for the 'radical left' aren't working

• Voters view Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden as more moderate than President Donald Trump, a new poll found.
• While 21% ranked Biden as a "moderate," only 8% percent did the same for Trump.
• The results suggest that Trump's campaign tactics to characterize Biden as a tool of "radical socialists" have not yet proved effective.

Voters perceive Democratic nominee Joe Biden as the more moderate candidate in the 2020 presidential race, according to a new poll, signaling that President Donald Trump's strategy to paint him as a tool of "radical socialists" has not yet proved successful.

Respondents ranked both candidates on a scale from one to seven, with one meaning "very liberal," four meaning "moderate" and seven meaning "very conservative," in a survey commissioned by Morning Consult/Politico released Wednesday.

The "ideal" ideological makeup for president was placed at 4.1, nearly dead-center. Biden rated at 2.7, and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, stood slightly more to the left, at 2.5. Both were closer to the middle than Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, who ranked 5.8 and 6, respectively.

While 21% of voters labeled Biden as "moderate," only 8% said the same about Trump. To illustrate further, around 30% of respondents marked Biden as "very liberal," compared with 43% who designated Trump as "very conservative."

The poll surveyed 1,991 registered voters with a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.

Notably, the results indicate that Americans view Trump as more ideologically extreme than Biden. Meanwhile, Trump has tried to produce the opposite effect as a campaign tactic, using ads, speeches, and on tweets to convince the public that Biden is far-left.

The figures also remain hardly unchanged from the same survey conducted last month, following Biden's announcement of Harris as his vice presidential pick.

Trump immediately tried to cast Harris as a radical, suggesting she is "most liberal person in all of Congress." This is not true, since Harris is to the right of some of her progressive House colleagues, though she was rated in 2019 as the most liberal senator by the independent congressional tracker GovTrack.us. The group tracks lawmakers' legislative moves and Harris ranked lowest, at 15%, on co-sponsoring Republican-authored bills that year. However, Harris' positions outside of her three-year tenure in the Senate provide a wider scope on her ideological stances: on the 2020 Democratic campaign trail, she distanced herself from more progressive policies like Medicare-for-All, and received heat from her opponents and liberals alike for her actions on criminal justice while she served as California attorney general.

Trump's team also went full-steam ahead with the same tactics during the Republican National Convention in August, going as far as to characterize Biden as a "Trojan horse" for the "radical left."

To be sure, some of Biden's policy proposals are the most progressive of any Democratic presidential nominee thus far.

He has proposed $5.4 trillion in new government spending over the next decade — more than double the figure proposed by 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton — to increase public investments in areas like housing and health care, according to a recent analysis by Penn Wharton Budget Model, a nonpartisan group at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

However, Biden's proposed federal budget is merely a fragment of those offered by his former liberal 2020 Democratic primary rivals, including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, which ranged from $30 trillion to $50 trillion.

Moreover, Trump and his allies have attempted to attach specific plans under Biden's agenda, such as defunding the police, abolishing the suburbs, and removing Second Amendment rights to support their accusations of him being a "puppet of the radical left-wing movement." None of these ideas are part of Biden's platform.

Biden has often fired back at the claims.

"You know me. You know my heart. You know my story," he said last month. "Ask yourself: Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really? I want a safe America."