Trump red state support eroding
Poll: Disapproval growing among female voters
President Donald Trump is on the defensive in three red states he carried in 2016, narrowly trailing Joe Biden in Iowa and battling to stay ahead of him in Georgia and Texas, as Trump continues to face a wall of opposition from women that has also endangered his party’s control of the Senate, according to a poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College.
Trump’s vulnerability even in conservative-leaning states underscores just how precarious his political position is, less than six weeks before Election Day. While he and Biden are competing aggressively for traditional swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida, the poll suggests that Biden has assembled a coalition that could be formidable enough to jeopardize Trump in historically Republican parts of the South and Midwest.
A yawning gender gap in all three states is working in Biden’s favor, with the former vice president making inroads into conservative territory with strong support from women. In Iowa, where Biden is ahead of Trump, 45 percent to 42 percent, he is up among women by 14 percentage points. Men favor Trump by 8 points.
In Georgia, where the two candidates are tied at 45 percent, Biden leads among women by 10 points. Trump is ahead with men by a similar margin of 11 percentage points.
Trump’s large advantage among men in Texas is enough to give him a small advantage there, 46 percent to 43 percent. Men prefer the president to his Democratic challenger by 16 points, while women favor Biden by an 8-point margin.
There was a significant gender gap in the 2016 election, too, but at that time it tilted toward Trump because men supported him so heavily, according to exit polls. In the Times poll, Biden sharply narrowed Trump’s advantage with men while improving on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 lead with women in Texas and Iowa.
In Georgia, Biden’s lead with women essentially matched Clinton’s final advantage in the 2016 race. But where Trump carried Georgia men by 23 points four years ago, he was ahead by about half that margin with men in the state in the Times poll.
The overwhelming majority of voters — about 9 in every 10 in all three states — say they have definitely made up their minds about whom to vote for, leaving relatively little room for late developments to shift the overarching shape of the race.
The poll, conducted by phone among likely voters from Sept. 16-22, had a margin of sampling error of 4 percentage points for Texas and 5 in Iowa and Georgia.
Trump’s tenuous hold on some of the largest red states in the country has presented Biden with unexpected opportunities and stirred debate among Democrats about how aggressively to contest states far outside the traditional battleground. Biden has made efforts so far in a few states that voted emphatically for Trump four years ago, including Georgia and Iowa, but has resisted pressure to compete for Texas, a huge and complicated state that Democrats believe is unlikely to furnish the decisive 270th Electoral College vote.
But the presence of competitive Senate races in many of those states has been a powerful enticement to Democrats, including Biden.
The lopsided gender dynamics of the presidential contest extend to Senate races in Iowa, Georgia and Texas, with Republican incumbents facing strong challenges from Democratic candidates favored heavily by women. The gender gap is pronounced even in Iowa, where both Senate candidates are women. The Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield, has a 2-point lead over Sen. Joni Ernst and an 11-point advantage with women.
The poll partly coincided with Trump’s announcement that he would make a new Supreme Court nomination to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but it was not clear from the survey whether voters had a particularly strong reaction to that possibility.
Reflecting the conservative tilt of the states polled, Trump and his party are in better shape than in most of the others recently polled by the Times, and he may ultimately carry all of them.