Former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump in head-to-head matchups in the crucial battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, according to new Fox polls released yesterday.
Almost half of registered voters in Michigan (49%) plan to support Biden versus 41% who say they’ll vote for Trump, the polls showed.
And the numbers are relatively similar in Pennsylvania, where Biden leads Trump by 8 percentage points, with 50% of registered voters planning to vote for the former vice president to 42% for Trump, according to the new Fox News polls.
A new Reuters poll, which ran from April 15-20 in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, showed 45% of registered voters said they would support Biden, while 39% said they would support Trump.
It also found that Biden, vice president under Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, has an advantage of 3 percentage points among registered voters in Wisconsin, 6 points in Pennsylvania and 8 points in Michigan.
Trump’s job approval stands at 47% approval, 51% disapproval in both Pennsylvania and Michigan, according to the Fox polls.
Governors in both states receive high marks overall and for their handling of coronavirus specifically.
Around two-thirds of Michigan registered voters approve of how Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is handling her job (63%) and handling coronavirus (64%), while 65% of Pennsylvania registered voters approve of how Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf is handling his job overall, and 69% approve of his handling of coronavirus.
Another poll from Quinnipiac University in Florida yesterday shows Biden leading Trump, 46% to 42%, among registered voters in the state.
Florida has 29 electoral votes and is considered a must-win state by the Trump campaign.
Trump receives 45% approval, 51% disapproval in Florida.
Half of registered voters in Florida approve of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ handling of the outbreak and 41% disapprove.
Another 6 in 10 think he should have responded to the crisis sooner.
Battleground states that handed Trump the presidency four years ago are seeing higher-than-average layoffs amid an economic downturn wreaking havoc across the country.
Job losses are piling up in places like Michigan, where more than one in four workers applied for unemployment benefits in the past five weeks, according to Labor Department data.
In Pennsylvania, another key Rust Belt state that voted for Trump in 2016, nearly one-fourth of the workforce has filed an unemployment claim since mid-March.
Ohio is seeing more than 17 percent of workers filing jobless claims, outpacing the national average of 16.1 percent, as is Minnesota, a state Trump narrowly lost.
The polls suggest that Trump has not experienced an uptick in support in the Midwest, even though he has commanded the public’s attention at the helm of the federal response to the coronavirus crisis and sought to cast himself as a “wartime president” fighting an invisible enemy.
A new national poll of America’s 18- to 29- year-olds by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School finds that Biden significantly leads Trump all young Americans (+23), and his advantage among likely voters (+30) is comparable to what Senator Bernie Sanders would have enjoyed at the top of the Democratic ticket.