Trump fans won’t like this, but numbers are numbers. Former Vice President Joe Biden never once matched Trump in the election RealClearPolitics poll averagebut the margins fluctuated. In early May, Biden’s lead was about four percent. By the end of the month, the percentage was over five percent. Biden currently has a lead of about eight percentage points nationwide. On average. This number is certainly increased by CNN’s conspicuous outlier image of Trump they are 14 points behind the leader (CNN also published what appeared to be another outlier last month, purporting to show Trump leading in key swing states).
For the sake of discussion, let’s exclude the turbulent CNN poll from this list and focus on the latest NBC/WSJ poll, which shows Biden with a seven-point lead. It reflects the national average almost perfectly; four of the last seven polls show the challenger’s lead is exactly the same. Here’s what this dataset looks like:
NBC/WSJ poll
Registered voters
Biden’s 49
Trump 42Independent
Biden’s 45
Trump 3518-34
Biden’s 54
Trump 3565+
Biden’s 51st
Trump 43Black
Biden’s 82
Trump 9Latino
Biden’s 57
Trump 33White
Trump 49
Biden’s 43https://t.co/VgRlUqvjGz— Bill Scher (@billscher) June 7, 2020
Trump had a four-point lead over Independent Hillary Clinton four years ago. He crushed it by 20 points among whites. He won the seniors with seven. In this poll, India loses by double digits, a relatively narrow advantage among white voters and an eight loss among seniors (reflecting a troubling trend for Team Trump). Contrary to CNN’s recent series of findings, NBC/WSJ programming national picture reflected on the battlefields: “Among voters living in the biggest battleground states – Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – Biden’s combined advantage over Trump is eight points, 50 to 42 percent.” And before you dismiss all this by noting that “the polls were wrong” in 2016, let me remind you that the nationwide average in polls was just one percentage point from accurately predicting the final margin of the nationwide popular vote.
There were several of them obvious failures certainly in a few essential states, but if Joe Biden’s lead is anywhere near seven points on Election Day, Trump will have no chance of threading the needle in the Electoral College like he did last time. For the math to work, it has to be close to the country. Another form of denial is to suggest that public media polls are skewed against Trump and what really matters is what the Trump campaign sees in its sophisticated data operation. About that: :
President Trump faces the worst prospects yet for his re-election bid, with his poll numbers slipping in both public and private polls, and his campaign beginning to worry about his position in states like Ohio and Iowa, which he has held by wide margins for four years ago. Trump’s campaign recently launched a multimillion-dollar advertising effort in those two states and Arizona, hoping to improve his standing while also shaking up his political activities and drawing modern attention to states like Georgia that were once considered reliably Republican. .The president is well ahead of Biden in a private poll conducted by the Trump campaign, according to people briefed on the latest round of results.
Fox News poll released last week showed Trump trailing by two points in Ohio, four points in Arizona and nine points in Wisconsin. Last cycle, Trump won all three states by eight, three-and-a-half and less than one points, respectively. All of this means that if the election were held on Tuesday – today – based on current data, there is a robust likelihood that President Trump would be defeated. This is straightforward and sobering news for Trump supporters. But is there any promising news? The key question is whether this voting moment marks an ebb or a modern normal. Much of the research that has been published over the past few days was conducted in the field at a particularly murky moment for the country, with three painful crises converging and convulsing simultaneously. It’s tough to imagine any incumbent doing well in the context of mass unemployment, a deadly pandemic and burning American cities.
However, since that terrible low, much order has been restored (the opposition has begun to rampage over the line), the public health situation appears to be improving overall, and report on terrible work dropped. And if voters generally believe that all three crises are fading or will begin to heal by the fall, Trump’s electoral standing has an obvious path to corresponding growth. Even in the shocking NBC/WSJ poll cited above, Trump maintains the advantage over Biden on some key issues:
The NBC/WSJ poll – conducted amid three crises – is nothing compact of gruesome for Trump, but some of its findings show glimpses of how he could make a comeback: pic.twitter.com/QBsVMX71Zv
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) June 8, 2020
Trump is clearly seen as a better steward of the U.S. economy and is marginally preferred in dealing with China – and this clearly prevails 83 percent American voters quite rightly attribute “some” or “a lot” of blame for the coronavirus outbreak. The building blocks for a potential comeback are already in place. The unknowable X-factor is how the electorate will feel and what will be their priority more than four months from now. If things return to quasi-normality, the incumbent may gain some recognition, or at least more slack. If the situation remains uncertain and society yearns for healing, a reset, NBC/WSJ shows Joe Biden doubling down on Trump on the “united country” metric. Finally, since China and coronavirus still seem to be massive, I’ll leave you with this: :
BREAKING: Satellite images showing a surge in vehicle traffic around major hospitals in Wuhan last fall suggest the coronavirus may have been spreading in central China long before it was first reported to the world, a modern study finds. https://t.co/t7hIyT6qYv
— ABC News (@ABC) June 8, 2020
