Joe Biden regained a sizable lead over President Trump in a pair of top-rated polls that followed the Democratic National Convention.
A Grinnell College/Selzer & Company national poll conducted from Wednesday to Sunday, the week after the Democratic convention and during the Republican convention, found that Biden leads Trump 49% to 41%. The poll result is based on interviews with 827 likely voters reached by telephone and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
The last time the college polled the presidential race was in March, when it found Biden with a 4-point lead over Trump.
In a Suffolk University/USA Today poll conducted Friday to Monday, following the end of both conventions, Biden captured 50% support, and Trump had 43% support nationally. That poll measured 1,000 registered voters contacted by both landline and cellphones and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Biden’s 7-point lead in the Suffolk/USA Today poll is slightly down from his 12-point from the organization’s June poll.
Some other recent national polls showed a much tighter race between Trump and Biden, with an Emerson College poll from Sunday to Monday giving Trump only a 2-point lead and an Aug. 19-25 Rasmussen poll showing Biden up by 1 point. The Democratic presidential nominee now has a 6.3-point lead over Trump in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, on par with his 7.4-point lead a month ago.
“The president has not expanded his coalition beyond his core base of supporters, who have always been a minority of the electorate,” said Grinnell College National Poll Director Peter Hanson. “His most likely path to victory is to do again what he did in 2016: Win the Electoral College with narrow victories in battleground states despite losing the national popular vote.”
The Grinnell College poll found that Biden held a 2-to-1 advantage over Trump with suburban women, 64% to 31%, while Trump held a 2-to-1 advantage over Biden with white men without a college degree, 64% to 31%.
“Beyond the overall 8-point advantage, this poll shows some areas of underlying strength for the former vice president,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer of Selzer & Company. “Mr. Biden holds a wide lead with moderates 55-33%, who are a plurality of the electorate; he benefits from a 10-point lead among independents who do not lean toward any political party, 44-34%.”
The Suffolk/USA Today poll found that independents were more persuaded by the Democratic convention than by the Republican convention: 33% said they were more likely to support Biden after watching the Democratic convention versus 31% who said they were less likely. For the Republican convention, 29% of independents said it made them more likely to support Trump versus 38% who said it made them less likely to support him.
Despite his lead, David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk Political Research Center, said that he thinks Biden is “no better off at this point” than 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who won the national popular vote but lost the election.
“Hillary was more polarizing and less likable than Biden in terms of the favorable/unfavorable ratings. However, Clinton had more enthusiasm than Biden does today, which makes the analysis a bit dicey,” Paleologos said.
