Biden leads Trump in 9 battleground states, polling shows

Joe Biden leads President Trump in nine battleground states heading into the crucial final stretch of the 2020 presidential campaign, according to new Morning Consult polling released on Tuesday.

The polling includes data from 11 electoral battlegrounds: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. Biden holds the lead in all but two of those states — Texas and Ohio — according to the polling data.

The surveys were conducted Aug. 21-30 and capture voter sentiments in some of the most critical battlegrounds in the wake of the Democratic and Republican national conventions.

In the vast majority of battleground states included in the polling, the conventions appeared to have little impact on the state of the race, with both candidates seeing only slight changes in their support in the days after their party’s convention.

The one exception was Arizona, where Biden saw a bump in support following the Democratic National Convention. Pre-convention polling from Morning Consult showed the former vice president with 45 percent support in the state to Trump’s 47 percent. In the latest poll, however, Biden leads Trump 52 percent to 42 percent.

Trump carried Arizona by 3.5 points in the 2016 presidential election. Since then, however, Democrats have pumped millions of dollars into the state in an effort to turn it blue. Biden’s post-convention polling bump suggests that their efforts may be paying off.

Nationally, Biden also holds the lead over Trump, though neither candidate saw a change in support following their respective conventions. The Morning Consult poll shows the former vice president garnering 51 percent of the vote to Trump’s 43 percent.

Still, that suggests that Biden is in a better position heading into the final stretch of the campaign than Hillary Clinton was four years ago. At this point in the 2016, Clinton led Trump by only 3 percentage points, according to Morning Consult polling data.

The surveys are based on responses from 17,813 likely voters across the 11 battleground states. The margins of error for each state range from 2 percentage points to 4 percentage points.