Trump attack against Biden falls short of breakthrough

President Donald Trump’s weekslong barrage against Joe Biden has failed to erase the Democrat’s lead across a set of key swing states, including the crucial battleground of Wisconsin, where Trump’s law-and-order message has rallied support on the right but has not swayed the majority of voters who dislike him, according to a poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College.

Biden, the former vice president, leads Trump by 5 percentage points in Wisconsin and by a 9-point margin in neighboring Minnesota, a Democratic-leaning state that Trump has been seeking to flip with his vehement denunciations of rioting and crime.

The president has improved his political standing in Wisconsin in particular with an insistent appeal to Republican-leaning white voters alarmed by local unrest<strong>. </strong>But in both Midwestern states, along with the less-populous battlegrounds of Nevada and New Hampshire, Trump has not managed to overcome his fundamental political vulnerabilities — above all, his deep unpopularity with women and the widespread view among voters that he has mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic.

Overtaking Biden in some of those four states could be a significant boost to Trump’s reelection chances. He narrowly won Wisconsin in 2016 and barely lost the other three to Hillary Clinton.

While Trump has steadied his candidacy since his political nadir early in the summer, the Times poll suggests that, less than two months before Election Day, he has yet to achieve the kind of major political breakthrough he needs.

Voters in Wisconsin and Minnesota are split on the question of which candidate they trust more to handle the subject of law and order, which Trump has tried to elevate. But the poll, conducted among likely voters, showed they prefer Biden by clear margins on the issues of the coronavirus pandemic, race relations and fostering national unity, a sobering result for the president’s supporters.

Further, Trump is still struggling to garner the level of support most incumbent presidents enjoy at this late stage of the campaign. In none of the four states did Trump’s support reach the 45% mark — a particularly ominous sign given the absence of serious third-party candidates, who in 2016 helped him prevail with less than 50% of the vote in a series of battleground states.

And while Trump delivered a focused set of attacks on Biden at the Republican convention, he has swerved far off message in recent days as he has struggled to rebut reports that he disparaged American war dead and told journalist Bob Woodward that he deliberately misled the public about the severity of the pandemic.

In Wisconsin, Biden received 48% support compared with 43% for Trump. That’s a significant drop-off from June, when a Times/Siena poll showed Biden ahead by 11 points.

Nearly all of the narrowing came as a result of Trump’s recovering support from voters to the right of center, some of whom had expressed feelings of disillusionment in the earlier poll amid the ravages of the pandemic and a major wave of racial-justice protests.

Biden is further ahead in Minnesota, 50% to 41%. Although no Republican presidential candidate has captured Minnesota since Richard Nixon’s reelection in 1972, Trump lost it by only 1.5 percentage points four years ago. His campaign wants to compete aggressively there to counter anticipated setbacks elsewhere in the industrial Midwest. Both nominees are headed there in the coming week.

Chris Rutherford, 51, of Minneapolis, is leaning back in Trump’s direction as a result of recent unrest. A Republican who said he was dismayed by Trump’s “constant lying,” Rutherford said he had been deeply troubled by the damage to his community inflicted first by the coronavirus pandemic and then by episodes of vandalism and rioting.

“Covid is wiping out these businesses and this was the nail in the coffin,” Rutherford said, stressing, “We cannot have these riots.”

Rutherford said that while he slightly favored Trump, he might still support Biden if he did more to warn of repercussions for people who “grotesquely violate the law.”

“He says, ‘I condemn,’ but he doesn’t ever say what he’s going to do,” Rutherford said, adding that if Biden went further it would be “the straw that would tip me over to him.”

In two less populous swing states that Trump barely lost in 2016, Biden is ahead of Trump by single-digit margins: He leads in Nevada by 4 percentage points, 46% to 42%, while in New Hampshire he leads by a 3-point margin, 45 to 42%.

The Times/Siena poll has a sampling error ranging from 3.9 percentage points in Minnesota to 5.5 in New Hampshire.

The four states surveyed in the poll may represent something of a last line of defense for Trump: Of the northern battlegrounds he captured in 2016, Wisconsin is seen as his best chance for winning again this year, over Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump’s campaign has viewed the other three states as potential pickup opportunities this year that could help him make up for lost ground elsewhere.

The poll results suggest that Trump retains a path to reelection that runs through these states, but that he has not yet made enough headway in any of them to catch up with Biden. With little time remaining, the three presidential debates starting at the end of this month may be the best remaining opportunity for Trump to make significant gains.

It is typical for polls to tighten in advance of Election Day, when more voters tune in to the campaign, candidates sharpen their attack lines and unleash new advertising and the forces of political polarization nudge people to the partisan corners of a divided country.

Still, any sign of Trump closing the gap is likely to stir anxiety among Democrats who remember all too well how the president overcame Clinton’s polling lead at the last minute in 2016.

In the four swing states polled, Biden’s advantage comes from a combination of strong support from women, people of color and whites with college degrees, although he is also performing better among male voters and less-educated white voters than Clinton did four years ago. Biden is well ahead of Trump among voters who live in the cities and suburbs, while Trump has a strong advantage with rural voters.

Across all four states, Trump is viewed mostly in negative terms, with slim majorities saying they see him unfavorably and disapprove of the job he is doing as president.

Trump continues to inspire stronger feelings from voters than his Democratic challenger, both positively and negatively: In Wisconsin, for instance, Trump is seen favorably by 45% of voters and unfavorably by 53%. But 32% of voters there have a strongly favorable view of him, while 45% view him in strongly unfavorable terms.

Wisconsin voters are somewhat more warmly disposed toward Biden, with 51% viewing him favorably and 45% seeing him unfavorably. But fewer voters had intense feelings about him in either direction: 29% viewed him in strongly positive terms and 36% had a very unfavorable view of him.

Notably, Trump fares substantially better with suburban voters in Wisconsin than in neighboring Minnesota, a dynamic that could reflect Wisconsin’s more conservative electorate and the immediacy of the public-safety issue in a state where riots struck the outer suburbs of Milwaukee in the last month.

In Minnesota, Biden was ahead among suburban voters by 20 percentage points. In Wisconsin, that advantage was just 5 points.

More significant for the former vice president is his strength with seniors, an advantage that Democrats did not enjoy four years ago. Biden enjoys a 12-point lead, 52 to 40, among people 65 and older across the four states and, by overwhelming numbers, they say he would do a better job than Trump unifying the country, handling race relations and addressing the pandemic.

These same voters remain deeply concerned about the virus, with 58% of them saying “the federal government’s priority should be to limit the spread of the coronavirus, even if it hurts the economy.”

If there is a warning sign for Biden in the survey below Trump’s modest growth, it is that many seniors want him to more forcefully denounce the violence that has grown out of the summer’s racial justice protests.

By a 20-point margin, 53-33, voters older than 65 in the four states said the former vice president had not done enough to denounce rioting. And 70% of these same voters said crime was a “major problem” in the country.

Ellen Christenson, a 69-year-old Wisconsinite, said she voted for former President Barack Obama twice before backing Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, in 2016. Now Christenson said she was torn between Trump and Biden and “could go either way.”

Biden, she said, had not sufficiently “condemned the violence and the burning.”

Originally a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, Christenson said she now felt it had “gone too far,” and she said she “kind of resented” that her workplace recently forced her to take a seminar on microaggressions.

Images of arson and violence in cities like Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, have plainly alarmed voters, albeit in a broader sense: They indicate being far more concerned about crime in the country than they are about in their area.

When asked which issue is more important, addressing the virus or addressing law and order, slightly more voters in the four states said law and order.

While Biden enjoys a 9-point advantage on the question of who would do a better job handling the protests, the difference is smaller on the matter of which candidate would better impose law and order.

And there are signs that Trump’s barrage against Biden on the issue of policing, while inaccurate, has been effective: 44% of those surveyed in the four states said he supported defunding the police while only 39% said he was not in favor of doing so, which the former vice president has said repeatedly.

Yet even as the president tries to steer the campaign away from the pandemic and toward urban unrest, some of the most pivotal voters are more focused on the virus.

Those who didn’t vote in 2016 and those who supported third-party candidates — potentially the decisive slice of this year’s electorate — each said by large margins that addressing the pandemic was more important than addressing law and order.