Thanks to Democrats’ circular firing squad on the Nevada debate stage on Wednesday night, President Trump ought to have woken up feeling pretty good about his reelection odds, and a Quinnipiac poll just confirmed that the primary’s front-runners aren’t just weak generally but specifically in the “swing states” that gave Trump his Electoral College victory in 2016.
In Wisconsin, Trump blows out every single top Democrat in head-to-head matchups. Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren lose to him by double digits, and supposed centrists Pete Buttigieg and Michael Bloomberg lose by 8 points. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden fare best against Trump, losing to him by 7 points, more than twice the poll’s margin of error.
Michigan is a toss-up, with every candidate within the margin of error except for Sanders and Bloomberg, who each best Trump by 5 points.
On paper, Democrats enjoy their best odds in Pennsylvania, with Biden leading Trump by 8 points, Klobuchar leading by 7, and Bloomberg leading by 6. But front-runner Sanders leads by a mere 4 points, and that’s before Trump plasters the state with clips of Sanders declaring that he plans to use executive powers to ban all fracking, a technique that has both driven America’s world-leading decline in carbon emissions and created jobs for hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians.
Although Biden still clings to his second-place status in the primaries and was no doubt helped by Bloomberg’s public implosion on the debate stage, betting markets indicate that Sanders, who dominates national and crucial state polling, has a 1-in-2 chance of winning the nomination. It’s possible that Biden ekes out a strong second-place finish in Nevada and then blows out South Carolina, reviving his campaign. But if any candidate is likely to head to the Democratic National Convention with a majority of pledged delegates, it’s the senator from Vermont.
Quinnipiac corroborates what previous polling has long warned for Democrats. They could face another Electoral College loss, but perhaps even narrower.
Assuming Trump has Wisconsin on lock, that leaves Michigan and Pennsylvania open for speculation. Seeing as how Hillary Clinton apparently supported fracking and still lost Pennsylvania, there’s ample reason to believe that Sanders would get blown out, especially considering the distribution of Clinton’s loss, as shown below:
Relevant fact: in 2016, Hillary Clinton won more votes in western PA outside the city of Pittsburgh (631,120) than she won in the entire city of Philadelphia (584,025).
Yes, Dems still have plenty of room to fall in western PA…and good luck running on a fracking ban there.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) February 20, 2020
So what about Michigan? Luckily for Trump, Quinnipiac also confirmed a string of recent Gallup polls finding that not only do voters overwhelmingly approve of Trump’s handling of the economy and their finances, but also that the economy is the No. 1 issue they care about at the polls. So, maybe he has a shot at winning Michigan again, too.
