The Democrats Need a Dual Strategy to Beat TrumpJudging by my social-media feed, a lot of people were shocked by the results of a newly released opinion poll from the New York Times and Siena College, which showed that Donald Trump remains “highly competitive in the battleground states likeliest to decide the election”—Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The surprise is a bit surprising. Presidential elections are nearly always close, battleground states have earned the label for a reason, and Trump’s approval rating has remained pretty steady since he was inaugurated. (So far, the impeachment process has only knocked it down a couple of points.) On the basis of these factors, you would expect the 2020 election to be tightly fought, particularly in swing states where, in 2016, Trump eked out a victory in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote. The Times poll merely confirms this supposition.
The poll has also drawn attention because of what it shows about head-to-head matchups between Trump and the three leading Democratic candidates: Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders. The poll showed Biden leading Trump among registered voters in four of the six states: Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It showed Sanders ahead in three states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Warren was leading Trump in just one state: Arizona. However, she was running level with him in two others: Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
These findings confirmed what other polls have found: in head-to-head polling against the President, Biden fares the best of the Democrats. Sanders is popular in the Midwest. Warren has work to do. But the numbers were too bunched up to support any definitive conclusions or predictions about next year’s election. In fifteen of the eighteen matchups—three for each battleground state—Trump was either leading or trailing his Democratic opponent, among registered voters, by three percentage points or less. Taking the six states together, Trump was losing to Biden by two points, running even with Sanders, and beating Warren by two points. All of these results were within the poll’s margin of error.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-democrats-need-a-dual-strategy-to-beat-trump
