Biden leads Trump by double digits: poll

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden now leads President Trump by 11 percentage points, according to an NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll released Thursday.

The poll placed the former vice president at 54 percent and Trump at 43 percent, making it the highest level of support Biden has received in the joint poll since it began in February. 

The latest results come from interviews with a random sample of nearly 1,400 adults from Oct. 8 to Oct. 13, with the final report noting an approximately 3 percentage point margin of error. 

The results match the 11-point advantage NBC and the Wall Street Journal found in their most recent poll released Thursday, although this was down from the 14-point lead Biden held in the previous NBC-Wall Street Journal poll published on Oct. 4. 

The NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist survey also found that Biden leads Trump among Black and Latino voters, as well as whites with a college degree, women, people who live in cities and suburbs, young voters and those who identify as independent. 

Biden also has an overall advantage among white voters, 51 percent to Trump’s 47 percent. According to NPR, Trump won white voters by 20 points in 2016, and no Democrat has won support from that large a share of white voters since Jimmy Carter in 1976. 

The survey was conducted after the first presidential debate, with 53 percent of those surveyed saying Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), benefited more from the event, while just 35 percent said the same for Trump and Vice President Pence. 

In an open-ended question in the poll, respondents were asked to describe each candidate in one word. The one most often used for Trump was “incompetent,” compared to “honest” for Biden. 

However, respondents also had positive words associated with Trump, including “good,” “great,” “successful” and “strong.” Other negative words that adults associated with the sitting president were “liar,” “failure,” “arrogant” and “buffoon.”

While many respondents described Biden as “confident,” “hopeful,” “good” and “trustworthy,” more negative characterizations included “old,” “confused,” “senile” and “weak.”

This polling comes as Biden leads Trump in several key battleground states with less than three weeks to go until Election Day. 

Results released Thursday from the Arizona Public Opinion Pulse conducted by the Phoenix-based OH Predictive Insights shows Biden leading Trump by a 49 percent to 45 percent margin in the Southwestern state. 

In Florida, a News Nation-Emerson College survey released on Monday showed Biden leading Trump 50 percent to 47 percent. The RealClearPolitics polling average shows Biden leading the president in the Sunshine State by 2.7 points as of Thursday.