Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump by at least six points in six new battleground state polls and a victory in three of them would be enough to hand the presumptive Democratic nominee the White House.
Trump beat rival Hillary Clinton in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina in the 2016 contest – a swath of victories that put him in the Oval Office.
But a new New York Times/Siena College surveys of those states shows the president has lost ground in all of them to Biden, with the Democrat holding a double digit lead in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Additionally, Trump’s once strong lead among white voters has essentially vanished – a voting bloc that was key to his 2016 win.
It was white working-class voters in battle states who catapulted Trump to victory.
Biden holds a 21-point lead among white college graduates in the new poll.
And he holds the lead among Black registered voters, 92 per cent to Trump’s 5 per cent in a new Washington Post-Ipsos poll.
If Biden should win any combination of the three states in the poll – along with all the states Clinton carried in 2016 – he would have a landslide in the electoral college and would become America’s 46th president.
The Times noted those six states were chosen for the poll because of ‘their mix of major cities, old industrial hubs, growing suburbs, and even farmland.’
A separate New York Times/Siena poll released Wednesday gave Biden a 14 point national lead.
And Biden leads Trump by 10 points in the Real Clear Politics polling average.
Biden has also taken the lead in Ohio, a must-win state for Trump.
A majority of voters, 63 percent, say they would rather back a presidential candidate who focuses on the cause of protests, even when the protests go too far, while just 31 percent say they would prefer to support a candidate who says we need to be tough on demonstrations that go too far.
Despite double-digit unemployment, 55 percent of voters in these six states say the federal government’s priority should be to limit the spread of the coronavirus, even if it hurts the economy, while just 35 percent say the federal government’s priority should be to restart the economy.
Even the newly unemployed, who would seem to have the most to gain from a reopened economy, say stopping the coronavirus should be the government’s priority.
Trump retains the support of 86 percent of respondents who said they voted for him in 2016, down from 92 percent in October.
Biden, by contrast, has emerged from a contested primary with a unified Democratic coalition.
He wins 93 percent of the voters who backed Hillary Clinton four years ago, as well as 92 percent of self-identified Democrats.
Biden also enjoys a significant advantage among those who voted for neither Trump nor Clinton in 2016.
He has a 35-point lead among battleground voters who said they backed a minor-party candidate or wrote in another.
Together, these shifts give Biden a six-point lead among voters who participated in the 2016 election, according to voter-file records.
Trump, in recent remarks, has take a divisive tone, seizing on culture wars and using race-baiting language in his speeches to supporters.
He has referred to the coronavirus by the racial slur ‘Kung flu’ and demanded protection for statues of Confederate officials that Black Lives Matter protesters and state officials are taking down.
Several Republicans have suggested a change in tone, while noting Trump rarely takes advice.
‘He’s good with the base,’ Senate Majority Whip John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, told CNN Wednesday. ‘But all of the people who are going to decide in November are the people in the middle, and I think they want the President at a time like this … to strike a more empathetic tone.’
He added: ‘It’ll probably require not only a message that deals with substantive policy, but I think a message that conveys perhaps a different tone.’