Cook Political Report Editor: Trump Polling Better with Minority Voters in 2020 Than in 2016
President Donald Trump is “doing better with nonwhites” in the 2020 election “than he was doing in 2016,” Cook Political Report editor David Wasserman said Thursday.
“The silver lining for Donald Trump, here, is that he’s doing better with nonwhites than he was doing in 2016,” Wasserman said during a panel on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “He’s winning on average 9 percent of the Black vote in these polls compared to 5 percent in his pre-election polls in 2016. And the Hispanic vote, Joe Biden is ahead 56 percent to 31 percent. The final polls in 2016, Hillary Clinton was up 61 percent to 23 percent. So, that’s a pretty decent number for Trump among Hispanics that I think is attributable to traditional Republican, Hispanic voters, including, potentially, Cubans, coming back to the Republican fold.”
However, Wasserman said, Trump has not been performing as well among white voters as he did during his first campaign, particularly those who are older.
“At least in Florida, what seems to be offsetting that, for now, is Joe Biden’s strong performance among white seniors which also helps him in Arizona,” he said. He added that Biden’s performance among white voters who were college educated meant Omaha, Nebraska represented his “best shot at flipping any piece of Trump real estate on the map.”
Wasserman said his numbers came from averaging “eight major live-interview polls … in mid-to-late August versus the same polls in June or July.”
In an earlier post on his own blog, Wasserman expanded on what the numbers could mean for either candidate, writing, “On the current trajectory, Biden has outstanding chances to flip traditionally GOP-leaning states like Arizona, Florida and perhaps even Georgia and Texas. But if he were to fail to effectively counter Trump’s appeals to working-class whites, Minnesota and Wisconsin could turn into the next Iowa and Ohio.”
Either scenario would represent a significant shift in the electorate. Minnesota hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972, while Texas hasn’t voted for a Democrat since 1976. Wisconsin narrowly voted for Trump in 2016, though more recent polls have shown him trailing Biden in the state, including a Fox News poll released Wednesday that suggested Biden was leading in the state by 8 percent.
Watch above via MSNBC.
