Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Poll: Biden maintains narrow lead in Pa.
Former Vice President Joe Biden continues to outpace President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, currently holding a slight lead over the Republican incumbent in the crucial battleground state.
In the latest Franklin & Marshall College poll released Thursday, the Democratic nominee leads the president by 6 percentage points.
The poll, which gives a final glimpse of where the race stands in Pennsylvania less than a week before Election Day, finds 50% of likely voters favor Biden while 44% support Trump. That margin is unchanged from the advantage Biden held in last month’s poll.
The findings suggest concerns about the coronavirus are weighing heavily on the minds of voters, who have seen case counts climb to record levels in recent days. When it comes to handling the pandemic, Biden is trusted much more than Trump, according to the results.
And Biden is notably favored when it comes to his ability to manage issues related to race and handle the job of commander in chief of the military, the poll found.
But Trump continues to have a slight edge when it comes to economic matters, according to the results.
The poll reflects interviews with 558 likely voters: 268 Democrats, 229 Republicans and 61 independents.
2020 versus 2016
Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall Director G. Terry Madonna said in a statement that partisanship and ideology are primary drivers of presidential preference, with Biden holding slightly larger portions of liberals than Trump holds among conservatives.
He added that differences in preference are also associated with geography, with counties that have large urban centers favoring Biden and predominantly rural counties backing Trump.
When looking at the numbers at the county level, Madonna said the elements that led to Trump winning the Keystone State by about 44,000 votes in 2016 are not lining up four years later.
“An important component of Trump’s 2016 victory in Pennsylvania came from a massive vote advantage in the counties he won, but Biden currently holds a larger vote share in the counties Hillary Clinton won than Trump holds in the counties he won that year,” he said.
The poll shows that in counties that Clinton won, Biden is the choice of 67% of voters. And in counties that Trump carried, the president is the favorite of 61% of voters.
The survey was conducted between Oct. 19 and Sunday. The margin of error is 5 percentage points for likely voters. The Reading Eagle is a media partner of the poll.
Different this time
During the 2016 presidential election, most people thought Clinton was going to win because the polls said she would.
So can we trust the polls this time around?
Madonna believes that we can. He told the Reading Eagle in a recent interview that he has taken all the necessary steps to prepare for the 2020 election and is confident that the problems that surfaced last time will not be an issue this time.
Madonna admitted his final poll in 2016 ended up missing the mark by a lot. That poll had Clinton ahead by 11 percentage points nine days out from the election. Trump ended up winning Pennsylvania by less than 1 point.
Madonna said he pinpointed several big factors that contributed to the miss. The biggest two were that voters made last-minute decisions and pollsters underestimated the intensity of Trump’s support.
The poll is showing about 5% of voters are undecided or voting third party. At this same point back in 2016 that number was 14%.
Madonna said one of the biggest lessons learned from 2016 was that the education level of respondents is extremely important. So now pollsters have been weighting their samples to properly represent voters without a college degree.