(CNN)Former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump in the polls for a lot of different reasons. One large one is his support from female voters. Biden is earning a historic amount of support from female voters for a presidential nominee when examining polling over the last 70 years. Take a look at the most recent live interview polls of registered voters from May and June compiled by The New York Times' Nate Cohn. Biden is leading among female registered voters by 59% to 35%, a 25-point margin when the numbers aren't rounded. That's a significant increase from his 19-point advantage earlier this year and the 14-point lead Hillary Clinton had in the final 2016 preelection polls of registered voters. Clinton had a 13-point edge with likely female voters. We can go back even further. Prior to 2016, Gallup would take its final preelection poll and readjust it to match the final margin. I look to Gallup to make the closest apples-to-apples comparison (i.e preelection polling to preelection polling) that we can make. The only year that comes close to what we see in the polls right now is 1964. That year, Democrat Lyndon Johnson won nationally by 23 points overall, and Gallup had him taking the women's vote by 24 points. Biden's doing a point better than Johnson did among female voters, even as he is doing 13 points worse overall. In no other year since 1952 did the Democratic nominee win among female voters by more than 15 points. (If we look at Republican nominees as well, Richard Nixon won the women's vote by 24 points in 1972 as he won nationally by 23 points.) Perhaps what makes Biden more impressive with women is how weak he is with men. He's seen only a 2-point climb with them from earlier this year and is still losing them to Trump by 6 points. That's about how Clinton did with them in the final 2016 preelection polling. Clinton trailed by 5 and 7 points among registered voters and likely male voters, respectively. In fact, the only candidate to win the presidency since 1952 and do as poorly as Biden is doing with male voters right now was Barack Obama in 2012. Obama lost them by 6 points, per Gallup's tally. The fact that Biden is leading overall (10 points) by a significantly wider margin than Obama won by (4 points), despite how poorly Biden is doing with men, is another indication of how strong he is with female voters. When you contrast female and male voters, you see that we could be heading toward a record gender gap. The 31-point difference right now blows past any in past preelection polling. Both 2012 and 2016 featured gaps of around 20 points. The average from 1996 to 2016 was a gap of about 16 points, which is only about half of what we're seeing in the polling right now. A gender gap isn't necessarily good for the Democratic Party. If Biden were winning among women by a point and losing men by 30 points, he'd be down significantly. Still, you'd rather have women on your side than men for the simple reason that they make up a slightly larger share of voters. Biden's overall advantage would be about a point less if women and men made up an equal share of the electorate. That doesn't matter at this moment, but it could if the polls tighten up. For now, all we can say is if this election were just left up to men, we'd be talking about a clear Trump lead instead of what it is in reality: a big Biden advantage.
Even betting odds are now going Biden’s way. Interestingly, quite a few people I’ve talked to have either relayed they are now Trump supporters or know someone who was previously against Trump now either supporting him or is open minded in doing so. The underlying reason is generally along the lines of sympathy generated tiwards Trump because of extreme and often flimsy media attacks on him. Overall, small sample size, so perhaps one could look at it anecdotally. Trump is still dangerous politically. If he has played his cards right in the previous year or so, there may be some “Special” revelations concerning Democratic political and media activities timed to be on top of voters minds before they vote for President.
Biden + 14 Biden +12...ON RASMUSSEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrew...ls-insist-polls-are-meaningless/#1e621b40237f New Polls Show Trump Down By Double Digits As GOP Officials Insist Polls Are Meaningless Andrew Solender 3-4 minutes Breaking|Jun 15, 2020,05:41pm EDT A new poll puts former Vice President Joe Biden 14 points ahead of President Trump, the same result as a CNN poll from last week that prompted the Trump campaign to demand a retraction, while a conservative pollster puts Biden up 12 points, but state and local Republican Party officials are adamant that the polls will not be predictive of the result in November. A poll from Abacus Data, conducted between June 11 and June 13, had Biden at 49% and Trump at 35% among registered voters. Biden holds an even wider lead in a group of swing states won by Trump in 2016–Florida, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin–with 52% to Trump’s 35%. Meanwhile, conservative commentator John Solomon’s website posted a poll that has the president down by 12 points from Scott Rasmussen, historically a pro-Trump pollster whose old firm, Rasmussen Reports, is frequently cited by Trump. In both polls, Biden is competitive among groups that Republicans typically dominate, like college-educated white voters and men. Trump has not reacted well to bad polling in recent weeks, with Trump’s campaign attorney sending a letter to CNN last week demanding they retract a poll showing him 14 points down and apologize. Chief Critic Local-level Republican operatives are taking a different tack from Trump in the face of bad polling, ignoring the numbers and rejecting the premise that the polling is accurate. “I used to be an avid poll watcher until 2016… Guess what? I’m not watching polls,” Jack Brill, a local Republican leader in Florida, told Politico, despite polls of that race predicting the final margin within 1.1 points. Tangent One difference between 2016 and 2020 that may be benefiting Biden is the lack of prominent third-party candidates. A poll from Redfield and Wilton strategies last week found Libertarian nominee Jo Jorgensen and likely Green nominee Howie Hawkins polling at 1% and 0% respectively. The RealClearPolitics average had 2016 Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson at 5% and 2016 Green nominee Jill Stein at 3% at this point in the cycle four years ago. Surprising Fact One new poll has Biden competitive in a state that Democrats have lost by landslide margins in recent elections: Arkansas. A poll from Hendrix College on Sunday had Trump up just 2 points in the state, which he won by 27 points in 2016. Some experts cast doubt on the notion that Arkansas is actually competitive, but the poll nonetheless serves as a grave sign for Trump, who is down in several typically Republican states like Texas and Georgia.
(CNN)Poll of the week: A new national Gallup poll finds that 39% of Americans approve of the job Donald Trump is doing as president, while 57% disapprove. That poll is in line with the average poll that shows Trump's approval rating is in the low 40s among all adults as well as voters specifically. What's the point: We've still got five months until the general election, which, in theory, is plenty of time for the race for president to change. Indeed, horserace polling has sometimes shifted considerably between this point and Election Day. Presidential approval ratings, however, haven't historically moved much from June of an election year to Election Day. It seems quite likely at this point that Trump's approval rating is going to be south of 50% and his net approval rating (approval - disapproval) to be negative when people vote. That should be deeply troubling to Trump, given the strong link between approval ratings and reelection chances. There have been 13 presidents who have run for another term in the polling era (since 1940). For each of those presidents, I compared their average Gallup (or, in the case of 1944, the Office of Public Opinion Research) June approval rating and their estimated approval rating on Election Day. The average president has seen his approval rating shift by just 3 points from now until the election. That would only get Trump into the mid 40s at best. Trump's approval rating was similar during the 2018 midterms, when his party lost control of the House. Net approval ratings tell the same story. The average president had his net approval rating shift by only 6 points from this point forward. Given Trump's net approval rating is in the negative low to mid-teens, a 6-point improvement would land him with a net approval around -7 to -10 points on Election Day. Again, that's about where he was during the 2018 midterms. Trump, though, isn't finished quite yet. It is possible for a president's ratings to shift around. Harry Truman saw about a 20-point increase in his net approval rating in the final five months of the 1948 campaign. On the other end, Lyndon Johnson's net approval rating declined by around 15 points in the final months of the 1964 election. Still, we're only talking about two presidents out of 13 whose net approval rating moved by more than 10 points in the final five months of the campaign. One of those two went in the wrong direction for the president. Trump needs his net approval rating to climb by more than 10 points to reach a positive net approval rating. Trump's fate against former Vice President Joe Biden won't be perfectly correlated with his approval rating, but it will be highly correlated. In our last CNN/SSRS poll, more than 90% of Trump approvers said they'd vote for Trump. More than 90% of disapprovers said they'd vote for Biden. One previous estimate from FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver suggested that a president with a 40% approval rating in the June before the election had only about a 20% chance of winning the upcoming election. That's largely jibes with more sophisticated models that take into account a slew of indicators. Can Trump be one of the 20%? Obviously. Don't round 20% down to 0%. Remember, though, that Trump's approval rating has been steadier than any president before him. There's no particularly strong reason to think he'll get a larger than average boost in his approval rating and therefore his reelection chances. The inability for Trump to move his own numbers is probably why he goes after Biden so much. Biden's less defined than Trump, and dragging Biden down may be the only chance Trump has to win.
June 15, 2020, 7:44 AM CDT By Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Carrie Dann and Melissa Holzberg WASHINGTON — One of the biggest differences in the presidential polling between 2016 and now is that Joe Biden’s negative numbers aren’t close to where Hillary Clinton’s were at this exact same point in the race. In the June 2016 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll — so after clinching the Democratic nomination but before the party’s convention — Clinton’s favorable/unfavorable rating was 33 percent positive, 55 percent negative (-22). And Trump’s was worse: 29 percent positive, 60 percent negative (-31). But compare those numbers with the fav/unfav results from our recent June 2020 NBC News/WSJ poll. Here’s Biden among registered voters: 37 percent positive, 38 percent negative (-1). And here’s Trump: 40 percent positive, 51 percent negative (-11). Now Republicans still have the opportunity to define Biden — 23 percent of voters have a neutral opinion of him (compared to 8 percent for Trump now and 12 percent for Clinton in 2016). Trump has improved on his numbers from four years ago (that’s what happens when you fully take over your party, which wasn’t the case back in June of 2016) And Biden still has plenty of work to do with the youngest voters (his fav/unfav here is just 26 percent positive, 35 percent negative), and his VERY positive rating is just 17 percent (though that’s 2 points higher than Clinton’s in June of ’16). But not only is Biden leading the ballot by a wider margin than Clinton was at this point in 2016, and not only is he besting Trump among voters who have an unfavorable view of both candidates. He’s also much less unpopular than Clinton was four years ago. By the way, here are the fav/unfav ratings for all of the figures and countries our recent NBC News/WSJ poll tested: Anthony Fauci: 50 percent positive, 11 percent negative (+39) Barack Obama: 57 percent positive, 30 percent negative (+27) Joe Biden: 37 percent positive, 38 percent negative (-1) Donald Trump: 40 percent positive, 51 percent negative (-11) China: 5 percent positive, 56 percent negative (-51) Russia: 5 percent positive, 56 percent negative (-51).
Trumpists: Polls are meaningless unless we're ahead Job numbers are meaningless unless we're in power Stock market is meaningless unless it's my president