With 100 days until Election Day, new polling finds presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden ahead in three battleground states that swung Donald Trump’s way in 2016. According to CNN polls conducted from July 18 to 24, Biden leads by single-digit margins among registered voters in Florida (51% Biden to 46% Trump) and Arizona (49% to 45%), and 52% to 40% in Michigan, an edge that mirrors the double-digit advantage Biden has over Trump nationally. Trump carried all three states in 2016, winning by the narrowest margin in Michigan. The former vice president’s lead, according to the findings, is largely thanks to his support among women. “Nearly all recent high-quality polling out of Florida and Michigan has shown Biden with an edge there, while in Arizona, there has been a mix of Biden leads and results within each poll’s margin of error,” CNN Polling Director Jennifer Agiesta reported on Sunday, noting that outlet’s new findings show Biden “narrowly outside the poll’s error margins” in Arizona.
For more than a month, Biden has held a wide lead over Trump in national polling averages—an advantage the New York Times reported to be the biggest of any presidential candidate in decades. Not since 1996, when Bill Clinton coasted past Bob Dole, has a candidate sustained such a significant national edge. Yet it’s worth remaining skeptical about the reliability of surveys this far out from Election Day, when many historic polls had the ultimate losers in the lead. On Twitter, Fox News’s Kevin Corke cited the example of Michael Dukakis, who at this point in the 1988 race had a 17-point lead over George H.W. Bush in a Gallup poll. Come November, Bush defeated Dukakis with 426 Electoral votes and carried 40 states. “The point is, lots can happen between July and November. Celebrating or hand-wringing over July polls is silly,” Corke, a White House Correspondent, wrote.
Things could look up for Trump if the economy starts to play a bigger role in vote choice: in both Arizona and Florida, 52% of those polled approve of Trump’s handling of the economy. But CNN notes the chances of such a shift coming anytime soon are slim, given the rapid surge in coronavirus cases that those areas have seen in recent weeks. Majorities in Arizona and Florida—57% and 64%, respectively—think that when it comes to the coronavirus outbreak, the worst is yet to come. Earlier this month, a Fox News Poll showed that 29% of voters see the pandemic as the country’s most pressing issue, nearly double the 15% focusing on the economy. According to polling, November’s race is among the elections where the vote has not hinged on the economy. And in the past, as CNN’s Harry Enten noted in May, those contests have gone to the candidate most trusted on the non-economic issue.
In addition to his coronavirus failures, Trump’s “law and order” response to this summer’s historic protests against racism and police violence may have done him further damage. As my colleague Peter Hamby wrote on Friday, Trump’s eroding position is not solely due to his reaction to the protests—though in the days that followed his now infamous Lafayette Square walk, his approval ratings tumbled to their lowest point in over a year, and their lowest since the start of the pandemic. The president’s botched handling of the coronavirus crisis and its economic fallout has been, most pollsters agree, the central factor hurting him politically. But if he loses in November, the nationwide reckoning that Trump met with an abject failure of leadership will “have to be seen as a significant breaking point,” Hamby wrote, citing the unprecedented public opinion shift in early June toward protesters and the anti-racism movement. As Hamby put it, “New polling and research provided to Vanity Fair suggests that the protests themselves changed America’s opinions about race so quickly, and so profoundly, that Trump unknowingly planted himself even further on the wrong side of public opinion than previously understood.”
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