New Polls Suggest the Presidential Race Is Still Joe Biden’s to Lose - The New Yorker

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Joe Biden walking in front of a blue background with a mask on — A brace of new polls suggest that, at least for now, Joe Biden’s lead over President Trump remains pretty stable.Photograph by Alex Wong / Getty

On Thursday, Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, visited Kenosha, Wisconsin, where they met for ninety minutes with the family of Jacob Blake, the Black man shot in the back seven times by a white police officer last month. Coming just two days after Donald Trump went to Kenosha but failed to meet the Blake family, Biden’s trip highlighted how the issues of race, police brutality, protests, and civil unrest have moved to the center of the Presidential campaign, partly because Trump is eagerly demagoguing them to divert attention from the coronavirus pandemic and scare some voters into his corner.

The Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh argued earlier this week that Trump had succeeded in dragging Biden onto his turf. “In the campaign of Republican dreams,” Ganesh wrote, “Biden spends the next two months explaining that ‘defund the police’ means something subtler, that ‘no justice, no peace’ is just a slogan, not a threat, and that neither is Democratic policy.” There is some truth in this—Biden’s strategists would prefer to be focussing on the pandemic. But Ganesh’s analysis also raises the question of whether Trump’s inflammatory campaign tactics, however cynical and odious, will be sufficient to alter the underlying dynamics of the election.

A brace of new polls suggest that, at least for now, the race remains pretty stable. Let’s start with the national data. On Wednesday, four live-caller telephone polls were published—from CNN, Grinnell College/Selzer & Company, Quinnipiac University, and Suffolk University/USA Today —which showed Biden with leads ranging from seven points (Suffolk University/USA Today) to ten points (Quinnipiac University). A number of new online and online-telephone polls also showed Biden out front. The margins in these surveys ranged from four points (Rasmussen/Pulse Opinion Research) to eleven points (The Economist/YouGov).

As ever, the easiest way to get an overview of all the latest findings is to look at the poll averages, which combine them. On Thursday evening, the Real Clear Politics poll average showed Biden leading Trump by 7.2 percentage points. That’s nearly identical to the lead he held a month ago, though it’s down a bit on the margin of 8.8 points he enjoyed two months ago. The message from these figures is that the race has tightened a bit since July, when fresh outbreaks of COVID-19 were dominating the news, but not by a great deal. And the two Conventions don’t seem to have had much impact at all.

In a highly polarized society, where most voters have already made up their minds about Trump one way or the other, that’s what you’d expect. Still, the bias in the Electoral College toward Republicans is very real. Even if Biden wins the popular vote, the election outcome could come down to a handful of swing states, particularly in the Rust Belt. These states are where the Trump campaign is concentrating its efforts, but the latest polling data emerging from them is mixed for him, at best.

Take Wisconsin, which Trump carried in 2016 by less than twenty-three thousand voters. If his misleading rhetoric about Biden going soft on rioters and anarchists were playing well anywhere, you might think it would be in a state where there were fires and looting during the demonstrations that followed the shooting of Blake. A Fox News poll that was carried out in Wisconsin from Saturday to Tuesday shows Biden leading Trump by eight points. That’s virtually the same margin Fox found in a previous poll, at the end of May. Another pollster, Morning Consult, has been conducting an online tracking poll of Wisconsin voters since May, which also shows a pretty stable picture. Currently, it has Biden ahead by ten points.

In Pennsylvania, which Trump carried in 2016 by about forty-four thousand votes, two new polls suggest the trend line is going more in his favor. One of them, from Monmouth University, shows Biden’s lead narrowing dramatically: to four points, from thirteen points in July. The other survey, from Rasmussen—a Republican-leaning pollster—shows the race tightening by three points in the past couple of months. Balanced against these polls, however, is a third one, from Quinnipiac University, which has Biden eight points ahead among likely voters. That’s the same margin this pollster found back in February, even before Biden had secured the Democratic nomination.

Moreover, the fact remains that there hasn’t been a poll showing Trump ahead in Pennsylvania since May. And the encouraging poll news for him from the Keystone State was offset by a second Fox News survey, from Arizona, which shows Biden leading by nine percentage points. The Grand Canyon State hasn’t voted for a Democratic Presidential candidate since 1996. In recent months, though, Biden has consistently been running ahead of Trump in the Arizona poll averages, although not by as much as the Fox News poll indicates. On Thursday, R.C.P.’s poll average for Arizona showed the Democrat leading by five points.

Taken together, these poll findings suggest Trump is still confronting the same basic challenge that the Republican Party faced in the 2018 midterms, when House Democrats made big gains: a majority of voters don’t like the President or approve of the job he is doing. According to the FiveThirtyEight poll average, Trump’s approval rating is 43.4 per cent, and his disapproval rating is 52.3 per cent. But the latest polls also point to a couple of more specific issues with the President’s inflammatory campaign strategy.

The first is that, despite his scaremongering, the threat he is pointing to doesn’t appear to be uppermost in the minds of voters. CNN’s pollsters asked the respondents to its survey how worried they were about a series of issues. Sixty per cent of people said that they were worried or very worried about the coronavirus; fifty-eight per cent said that they were worried or very worried about the economy. Only thirty-seven per cent said that they were worried about crime, and just thirteen per cent said they were very worried about it.

Even if Trump succeeds in changing these numbers, it’s not a guarantee that he will benefit much, because most Americans don’t see him as a reassuring presence. When the pollsters from The Economist/YouGov asked voters how they felt about his ability to deal wisely with crime, thirty-seven per cent of respondents said they were confident and fifty-three per cent said they were uneasy. Quinnipiac University’s national poll inquired of potential voters whether having Trump as President made them feel more safe, less safe, or had no impact. Thirty-five per cent said it made them feel more safe. Fifty per cent said less safe.

Why, then, is Trump placing so much emphasis on crime and public safety? The obvious answer is that he hasn’t got anything else, but the Quinnipiac pollsters provided some insight into Trump’s motivation. When they asked Americans whether having him as President made them feel safe, they found a huge discrepancy between white voters who have four years of college and white voters who don’t. Among the college graduates, almost sixty per cent said Trump made them feel less safe, and just twenty-eight per cent said they felt more safe. Among non-college graduates, the figures were practically reversed.

One way to interpret these findings is that Trump has practically given up on appealing to large chunks of the electorate and is betting everything on getting a huge turnout of white working-class voters in places like Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Given the hole he’s dug himself into, this isn’t an irrational strategy; surveys show large numbers of non-college whites don’t vote at all, which suggests that Trump may have room to increase his vote. Right now, though, he looks like a long shot. Of course, there are still two months to go until Election Day, and things could change after Labor Day. By tradition, that’s when the most intense campaigning begins.