A New York Times/Siena College poll out Thursday shows former Vice President Joe Biden opening up a wide lead among registered voters in six key states President Donald Trump won in 2016.
In some cases — particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — Biden leads the president by double digits, likely giving the Trump campaign some pause as they re-evaluate their campaign team and their campaign strategy.
“The surveys – conducted by Siena College for the New York Times – show the former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee leading the GOP incumbent in the White House 47-36 percent among registered voters in Michigan, 50-40 percent in Pennsylvania, and 49-38 percent in Wisconsin,” Fox News reports.
In addition, Biden now leads in Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina — three states Trump won by a solid margin in 2016, when facing off against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — by comfortable margins.
All of the states listed were narrowly “blue” before Trump turned them red in the last election, and the campaign is likely to know that Trump needs to make a strong argument for his own continued employment within the Rust Belt, where manufacturing and industrial workers make up the vast majority of swing voters.
Although the New York Times leans left editorially, the NYT/Siena College polls have often been good predictors of electoral success and failure — and it was an NYT/Siena College poll, which showed that progressive 2020 contenders like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) losing dramatically to Trump in places like Florida and Arizona that drove many key Democrats to abandon the far left and embrace the more “moderate” Biden candidacy back in early 2020.
Fox News also notes that “most of the polls released on Thursday are pretty much in line with results from other recent surveys in the six key battleground states. An average of the latest polls in these states compiled by Real Clear Politics shows Biden with an 8.6 point margin in Michigan, 8 points in Wisconsin, 6.3 points in Pennsylvania, 6.2 points in Florida, 4 points in Arizona and 1.4 points in North Carolina.”
And while other polls have seemed to indicate voters currently see the 2020 election as a referendum on Trump’s performance, the NYT/Siena College poll specifically shows support for Trump eroding among white voters — the president’s key constituency. Although white voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy — in this case, by a wide margin — they remain concerned about his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and of the widespread unrest that followed the death of George Floyd, a black man who perished while in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department.
“Trump faces headwinds on his handling of the protests against police brutality and racial injustice as only 31% believe he has handled them well,” Axios reports. “55% of the battleground voters said they believe the federal government should be working to limit the spread of the coronavirus, even if it hurts the economy, while just 35% said the federal government needs to restart the economy.”
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