Analysis: Another Brutal Week of Polls for Trump/GOP

Thursday Poll Roundup -  Another Brutal Week of Polls for Trump/GOP

Every Thursday NDN publishes its Thursday Poll Roundup, a deep dive into recent polling and political trends. You can sign up to receive it each week and feel free to review previous editions too. NDN’s Simon Rosenberg also does a regular Wednesday webinar on national polling trends – learn more, sign up here.  

Top Lines– Polling continues to be shockingly bad for Trump and McConnell.  Trump’s job approval is now at 40.7/56.1 (-15.4), among the worst spreads of his Presidency, and 7 points worse than where he was on Election Day 2018 when Rs lost the House by 8.6 percentage points. The Congressional Generic is up to 49.2/40.3 (-8.9) for the Dems, and the Real Clear Presidential average is now 49.7 Biden 40.3 Trump (-9.4).  

Important to note that 8-10 point spread.  Biden winning by 8-10 pts would put the final vote at 55-45, 54-46.  Trump/GOP received 44.8% of the vote in the 2018 House races, and 46% in 2016.  45-46 is where he’s been these last few years, and it is likely where he will be on Election Day 2020.  It’s not our view that the race will tighten in the coming months, as it would require Trump to get up into the high 40s, a place of job approval and popularity he hasn’t shown the ability to get to in his five years on the national stage.  And why given his awful performance would he gain new supporters at this point? Worst economic record since Hoover, historic deadly surrender on COVID, selling out the US to Russia and China, very public embrace of white supremacy, repeated efforts to strip pre-existing coverage from hundreds of millions of people in the midst of a pandemic…… yikes on defending all that.  

Two Trends To Watch- There are two notable trends we want to drill down on this week, both involving North Carolina. 

The first is the continued suppression of the GOP brand in the Senate races, something we’ve been discussing with you for some time.  In almost every poll battleground GOP incumbents are at 40-41-42-43, and trail their Democratic challenger.  It’s true in AZ, CO, IA, ME, NC – enough states right now for Dems to flip the Senate.  Yesterday a new poll dropped in Montana, and it had Governor Bullock leading 47-43 – remarkably similar numbers to polls we’ve seen in these other states.  AZ and CO look like they are gone now for McConnell, so Dems have to win 2 of these other 4 (IA, ME, MT, NC) to flip it and right now Dems lead in all 4 (and are competitive in the two GA races, and maybe KS and SC too).  

Yesterday the right of center business network CNBC released a slew of polls which caught our eye. These particular polls had been trending a little pro-Trump this year, but this batch came in square in the mainstream of polling right now in battleground Presidential states and Senate races.  With one exception – North Carolina.  CNBC had Dem Senate candidate Cal Cunningham up 51-41 (10 pts!) over Senator Thom Tillis, and Biden beating Trump 51-44.  While this is a single poll, the question now is has Trump’s yanking of the GOP Convention from North Carolina doing damage to the GOP brand there? 

If NC is joining AZ and CO as lost Senate causes, Dems only need one more to flip the Senate.  But if North Carolina is really moving away from the GOP right now, the impact on Trump’s re-elect will be profound (this is the second trend). As we’ve written, recent weeks have seen other must win Trump states FL and WI trend away from Trump.  If North Carolina is joining them, it means that Trump’s Electoral College hill is getting that much steeper and the prospect he could win the Presidency without winning a majority of the vote seems ever more distant. Need to keep an eye on North Carolina polling in coming weeks to see if CNBC picked up a new trend early or was an outlier.  

The other emerging Electoral College challenge for Trump is the utter failure of his COVID response in three critical Sunbelt battlegrounds, AZ, FL, and TX (the CNBC release has a lot of good data on this).   If even 2-3% of the electorate in those states decide to now vote for the Democrats because of this massive GOP policy error that too will make the President’s already steep EC hill even steeper.  This too is a trend to watch.