Trends.
One of the most memorable polls of the last year, and among the most encouraging for Trump, was the NYT’s battleground survey from last November. Trump trailed various Democratic primary candidates big in national polling even at the time, but at the end of the day national polls don’t matter. States matter.
And only a handful of states, at that.
Look past the national polls, the Times wrote in November, and you’ll see that Trump is well positioned to pull the same trick he pulled in 2016. Biden was his toughest match-up among the Democratic contenders, but even against Biden he managed to make the battlegrounds a coin flip.
That was eight months, one pandemic, and a series of nationwide anti-racism protests ago. You already know what the latest NYT national poll looks like, but Nate Cohn went digging through that data to see what the margins look like in the battlegrounds specifically. How far has Trump slipped since November?
A lot, it turns out:
Note that the November survey was a poll of likely voters whereas the new one’s a poll of registered voters. We can safely knock a few points off of Biden’s margin in each state here. But not six points. And certainly not 11.
Cohn sees the same problem in the battlegrounds as we saw in the national data yesterday: The white vote is in play, and you can’t win as a Republican when that’s the case. Specifically, Biden’s up 21 points among white college grads; in the November poll he led them by just 10. Trump’s also lost ground among his core base of whites without a degree, sliding from a 24-point lead in November to a 16-point lead now. In fact, notes Cohn, Trump trails outright among whites in all three Rust Belt battlegrounds. In 2016 he won that demographic in those states by nearly 10 points.
So, ~all of Biden’s gains relative to Clinton in the battlegrounds are because of white voters, both college and noncollege whites. Interesting in the context of the protests and Trump’s attempts to appeal to white identity. https://t.co/Zv1BMiIDBK
Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 25,2020
Despite everything that’s happened in America since November 2019, Biden’s margins among blacks and Latinos in the swing states have barely budged. All of the erosion for Trump is among whites.
The pandemic and the protests — or rather, his tone-deaf response to each — seem to be what’s killing him:
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.
