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Tag: national polls
Joe Biden

Biden Pulls Even With Trump In Latest National Polls

In the four weeks since his fiery State of the Union address, President Joe Biden's campaign has kicked into high gear—barnstorming eight battleground states, opening up more than 100 field offices, making a $30 million ad buy, and launching a Latino outreach strategy targeting the Southwestern swing states of Arizona and Nevada.

Some polls have begun to see movement in Biden's direction, including a recent Bloomberg battleground poll, the Marquette University polling released Thursday, and the NPR/PBS/Marist poll (compared to its January/February survey).

Since last fall, the standard line in national political reporting has been that Trump leads Biden in the polling. That construct doesn't hold true any longer. Eyeballing the last two weeks of polls released by nonpartisan outfits (excluding Trafalgar Group) on 538's aggregate, Biden won six of them, Trump won five, and one found them even.

Data analysts far smarter than me also see positive movement for Biden.

The 538 generic ballot continues to be better for Democrats relative to results earlier this year. At 44.6% to 44.4%, Democrats are now up by a whisper over Republicans, who consistently led in the generic this year until roughly a month ago when Democrats pulled even.

It's impossible to intuit exactly what goes into subtle shifts among the electorate, but Trump hasn't exactly been killing it on the campaign trail. His campaigning over the past month has mainly consisted of making courtroom appearances, golfing, some fundraising, and 'Truthing' his endless grievances.

The presumptive GOP candidate did manage to cause a stir this week in the battleground state of Michigan, where he lied about speaking with Ruby Garcia’s family. The Michigan woman was murdered by a man who was in the country illegally. Trump never spoke to her loved ones.

“He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV,” Mavi Garcia, who has acted as a spokeswoman for her family, said in an interview with WOOD-TV8, the NBC affiliate for West Michigan.

Other local media outlets carried similar stories refuting Trump's false claim.

From a campaign standpoint, it wasn't exactly a home run, even though the virulently anti-immigrant aspect of the stop surely thrilled his MAGA faithful.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Report: Trump’s Best Poll Numbers Show How Unpopular He Is

Report: Trump’s Best Poll Numbers Show How Unpopular He Is

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

No one is a louder or more aggressive cheerleader for President Donald Trump than Trump himself. The president, now 73, uses his favorite social media outlet, Twitter, to not only attack and defame his political opponents but also, to brag about his “accomplishments” or his poll numbers. In a report for the Daily Beast, Julia Arciga and Sam Stein note that Trump has tweeted his poll numbers on 28 separate occasions during his time in office. But upon careful analysis, the Beast reporters stress, the polls that Trump is bragging about — when taken as a whole — actually illustrate how unpopular he is.

Analyzing the 28 polls that Trump has tweeted since being sworn into office in January 2017, Arciga and Stein report that they show an “average approval rating” of “49.07%.”

“In other words,” Arciga and Stein write, “even the president’s cherry-picked data shows that he hasn’t broken through with the majority of the country.”

Moreover, the Daily Beast journalists add, those 28 polls “are hardly a scientific sampling of Trump’s job approval numbers” because they “skew heavily towards pollsters — one in particular — that tend to draw a more sympathetic result for the president.”

The “one in particular” that Arciga and Stein are referencing is Rasmussen: 22 of the 28 polls were conducted by Rasmussen, which has tended to be more favorable to Trump than other pollsters.

None of that is to say that Trump won’t win a second term in 2020. Arciga and Stein observe that past presidents who had approval ratings below 49.07 percent around their 888th or 900th day in office were reelected, including Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Obama, for example, “was at 43%” in a Gallup poll on “his 889th day in office.” But they quickly add that “Trump, of course, is not actually hovering around 49.07%.”

“His latest Gallup number, taken 877 days into office, is 43% approval,” Arciga and Stein note. “And the rolling average of all poll numbers — not just the selective chosen Rasmussen surveys — has him in an even worse position.” Factoring in “538 averages” from a long list of polls, they observe, Trump’s average approval rating was at 42.2 percent on July 1.

Of course, a president’s popularity can fluctuate. The late President George H.W. Bush enjoyed stellar approval ratings, according to Gallup, during 1991’s first quarter, including 82% approval in January 1991 and a whopping 89 percent approval in March 1991 — only to be voted out of office in November 1992 thanks to an economic downturn in the United States. And the fact that Trump is unpopular with Americans on the whole doesn’t mean that he isn’t popular among his hardcore base. The Americans who are proudly wearing their MAGA hats at Trump rallies tend to be a demographic that is likely to show up on Election Day: older, white, conservative, living in a small town or a rural area. As horribly flawed as the modern Republican Party is when it comes to ideas and policy, it is great at turning out its base.

But as the Beast report demonstrates, the polls that Trump has been bragging about aren’t nearly as impressive as he would like them to be.

 

Clinton’s Lead Over Trump Jumps In National Poll

Clinton’s Lead Over Trump Jumps In National Poll

A new McClatchy-Marist Poll reports that Hillary Clinton and her running mate Tim Kaine have a 15 point lead, nationally, over the Trump/Pence team.

Clinton’s lead over the GOP nominee has grown substantially over the last few weeks, since mid-July, when she last polled at just three points above Donald Trump. After each of the party conventions, Trump’s public persona has gone on a seemingly endless nosedive: he disparaged the Muslim parents of a slain American soldier, kicked a baby out of one of his rallies, and balked at supporting House Speaker Paul Ryan, a cornerstone politician of the modern GOP.

The new poll finds Clinton/Kaine at 48 percent, with Trump/Pence lagging behind at 33 percent.

Dr. Lee M. Miringoff, Director of The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, discussed the results as follows: “The tale of the tape is that Trump now trails Clinton by double digits and, in contrast with Clinton, is viewed as unacceptable by the majority of the electorate.”

Of those polled, five percent are undecided, and 12 percent say they would not support either candidate if the election were held today.

Part of the boost to Clinton’s numbers is from white and African American voters. Prior to this most recent poll, Trump was ahead of Clinton among white voters by 15 percent. Now, however, Trump only holds a two percent lead over Clinton with this group. Additionally, support for Clinton among African American voters has gone up to 93 percent from 81 percent.

For complete McClatchy-Marist Poll findings and methodology, go to The Marist Poll’s website, http://www.maristpoll.marist.edu.

Photo: Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton points at President Barack Obama as she arrives onstage at the end of his speech on the third night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania U.S., July 27, 2016.  REUTERS/Jim Young

Why Americans Trust Clinton More Than Trump On Terrorism

Why Americans Trust Clinton More Than Trump On Terrorism

More Americans trust Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump to handle issues of terrorism and national security, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll found.

While Clinton has maintained an upper hand on this issue since November, her lead over Trump is up eight points against a similar poll on June 19 — in no small part because of the two candidates’ radically different responses to the shooting at Orlando’s Pulse gay nightclub.

Indeed, as Clinton promoted gun control policies, Trump issued one of the most most xenophobic, Islamophobic speeches of his campaign to date. She called for the U.S. to avoid demonizing Muslims; he called for increased racial profiling, monitoring mosques, and a ban on immigration.

Although Trump has boasted about his strong stance on tackling “radical Islamic terrorism,” the poll suggests that voters believe the Clinton campaign had the superior approach. More Americans said they thought she did a better job in responding to the tragedy, by 46 percent to Trump’s 28, while a whopping 34 percent more respondents said she showed better temperament throughout.

That should come as no surprise, though, when Trump’s initial response consisted of congratulating himself for “being right” on the topic.

Finally, the poll shows that results also translate into support for Clinton on terror threats in general. Just over half of those polled said Clinton gave them confidence in responding to similar future attacks, compared to Trump’s 34 percent.

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton comments on the just-released Benghazi report as she speaks at Galvanize, a learning community for technology, in Denver, U.S. June 28, 2016. REUTERS/Rick Wilking