Trouble.
All good news is relative at this point, so here’s the good news today: There aren’t many *state* polls this week showing the bottom falling out for Trump over the past week. For instance, a poll of Wisconsin from the respected outfit at Marquette Law that was released within the last few hours shows him within five of Biden,46/41. Is it encouraging for an incumbent to be at 41 percent in a swing state less than a month from Election Day? It is not. But could something happen between now and then to erase a five-point lead? Sure. Wisconsin isn’t lost yet. The national picture is different. If you follow election polls, you know that Rasmussen tends to have the rosiest numbers for Trump among all of America’s major polling outfits. (Arguably it’s been overtaken on that score by Trafalgar, but that’s a subject for another day.) If Rasmussen has the race Biden +12 then maybe it’s time to panic. The latest national telephone and online survey finds Biden leading President Trump 52% to 40% among Likely U.S. Voters. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate. Another four percent (4%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.) Last week, following Trump’s announcement that he was nominating federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court, Biden moved from a narrow one-point lead to eight points ahead. The race had narrowed over the previous three weeks. Biden has now cleared the 50% mark for two weeks in a row, while Trump has fallen to his lowest level of support since the first week of White House Watch in early July. It’s interesting that Rasmussen saw big movement towards Biden after the Barrett announcement, not Trump’s widely panned debate performance three days later. Other polling suggests that voters are warming up to Barrett. Maybe trying to fill that seat so late in the race is more of a liability for the GOP than we realize. We’ve spent the past three days flagging national polls showing Biden suddenly up double digits and pronouncing each of them an outlier, but the trend is now unmistakable. Of six national surveys conducted partly over the weekend, after Trump had been hospitalized for COVID, four of them have the Democrat up 10 or more and another has him up nine.
