Just-released polls contain bad news for President Trump and his Senate allies, with Joe Biden expanding the electoral map to states that have long been safe bastions for the Republican Party.
Biden is solidifying his lead over Trump in Arizona, a state not won by a Democrat in a presidential race since Bill Clinton took it in 1996, according to a new survey by OH Predictive Insights. Biden leads Trump by 7 percentage points in Arizona. The poll has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
The same survey also had bad news for Senate Republican incumbent Martha McSally, who appears to be losing ground in her reelection bid against Democrat Mark Kelly. A former astronaut and the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, Kelly now leads McSally by 13 points. A month earlier, the same poll showed Kelly ahead by 9 points.
In Georgia, Biden leads Trump by a single percentage point, 48 percent to 47 percent, according to a poll conducted by Civiqs/Daily Kos that was released Tuesday and has a margin of error of 3.1 percent.
An internal poll conducted last week by a group backing Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp found Biden ahead of Trump by a margin of 47 percent to 46 percent. The poll had a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
Both polls showed Democrat Jon Ossoff running strong against incumbent GOP Sen. David Perdue. While Ossoff has yet to secure his party’s nomination, he leads Perdue by 2 percentage points in the Civiqs/Daily Kos poll and trails by 2 points in the internal Republican poll.
If Biden does defeat Trump in November, Democrats will need to flip just three Senate seats to retake control of the chamber where Republicans currently hold a 53-47 seat advantage. With Biden’s victory in the Democratic primary coupled with the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, the chances of what had been considered a long shot have greatly increased.
“It’s an extraordinary turn of events,” Neil Newhouse, a GOP pollster, told Vox. “This is not the political environment we expected at the beginning of the year.”
Not all the polls in recent weeks show Biden and Democrats cruising to victory. While the presumptive Democratic nominee also leads Trump in Florida by 4.6 points among likely voters, according to a poll released Tuesday by Point Blank Political, an Emerson College poll released last week showed the president leading Biden in Texas by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent in a head-to-head matchup.
Still, referencing recent surveys in Arizona, Georgia and Texas that show Biden competitive or leading in those states, Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said Friday that the former vice president would make a play for those traditionally red states.
“We believe that there will be battleground states that have never been battleground states before,” O’Malley Dillon said in a call with reporters. “We feel like the map is really favoring us if you look to recent polling.”
