Much to CNN’s chagrin, their own new poll shows President Trump leading former Vice President Joe Biden in 15 battleground states, 52%-45%. Those states include Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. Seven of those states voted for Trump in 2016: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Eight voted for Clinton: Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia.
CNN noted an important recent shift: “The results suggest that younger voters in the battleground states are tilted in favor of Trump, a stark change from the last CNN poll in which battleground voters were analyzed in March, even as other demographic groups shifted to a smaller degree.”
That finding flies in the face of a quote from Rock the Vote president Carolyn DeWitt, who stated in November 2018 that young voters were increasingly voting against Trump, adding, “I think there is a reaction to, sort of, the aggressive maneuvers of the administration on progressive values. This is a very progressive generation. They identify as progressives.”
The poll found 95% of Republicans backed Trump while 95% of Democrats backed Biden. One salient and significant difference between the candidates; 50% of Independents favored Trump while 46% backed Biden. Reuters reported last August, “Voters declaring themselves as independent of a major political party rose nationally by 6 percentage points to 28 percent of the U.S. electorate between 2000 and last year’s congressional midterm contest in states with party registration, analyst Rhodes Cook wrote in Sabato’s Crystal Ball political newsletter at the University of Virginia Center for Politics … Republicans won the independent vote by 7 percentage points in 2016.”
Biden’s 51%-46% edge nationwide in the CNN poll came from the fact that there are simply more voters identifying as Democrats. Pew Research reported in October 2019:
A wide range of evidence shows that there are more Democrats than Republicans in the United States today. Gold-standard, nonpartisan surveys have found for decades that more U.S. adults identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party than the Republican Party – whether these surveys take place under GOP or Democratic presidential administrations. That is the finding of two of the highest-quality surveys that use nationally representative data collected through in-person interviews: the General Social Survey and the American National Election Studies.
But Trump’s biggest advantage came regarding the economy in the CNN poll; 54% of voters trusted him to handle it, while only 42% said the same about Biden. The latest aggregate poll survey from Real Clear Politics found that 52% of people approved of how Trump handled the economy.
Additionally, 49% of voters in the CNN poll said Trump had the stamina and sharpness to be president while 46% favored Biden.
Women favored Biden in the CNN poll, 55% to 41%, as did people of color, Biden 69% -Trump 26%. Men favored Trump 50%-46%; white voters favored Trump 55%-43%.
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