As President Donald Trump looks to reboot his campaign with the Republican National Convention, new Morning Consult polling shows him trailing his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, both nationwide and in North Carolina, a pivotal swing state and the site of the scaled-down party gathering due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden leads Trump by 10 percentage points nationally, 52 percent to 42 percent, according to surveys of 13,272 likely voters conducted Aug. 21-23 following the conclusion of the largely virtual Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. The national poll had a 1-point margin of error.
While the margin is not a significant improvement on where Biden stood heading into last week’s gathering, it nonetheless leaves the Democratic Party in a much stronger position than its standing coming out of its Philadelphia confab four years ago, when Hillary Clinton led then-candidate Trump by just 3 points, 43 percent to 40 percent.
And in addition to Biden’s 10-point advantage among likely voters — which ties a Morning Consult high — the latest national polling also finds a record-high 51 percent of likely voters with a favorable view of him over the past three days, compared with a record-low unfavorability rating of 46 percent. Trump, by comparison, begins his own party’s renominating shindig 12 points underwater, with 43 percent of likely voters viewing him favorably nationwide and 55 percent taking the opposite view.
Things look a little better for the president in North Carolina, where responses collected Aug. 14-23 among 1,541 likely voters in the state show him trailing Biden by 3 points, 49 percent to 46 percent, just inside the poll’s 2-point margin of error. Biden’s slim edge in the Tar Heel State is driven partly by his superior standing with moderates, who are backing the Delawarean by a 41-point margin.
