New poll puts Trump ahead of Biden with gap widening in key swing states

Democracy Institute director Patrick Basham said his poll confirms the Democratic Party misread the public about the violence stemming from the Black Lives Matter protests.

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

A new public opinion poll puts President Donald Trump ahead of challenger Joe Biden for the first time in several months and predicts Trump will emerge victorious in the November election, the Daily Express reported over the weekend.

The poll conducted for the Sunday Express by the Democracy Institute, a right-leaning think tank with offices in Washington and London, showed Trump has a three point lead with 48 percent of popular support while Biden has 45 percent, with seven percent undecided or refusing to say who they would vote for.

It is the first recent poll showing Trump ahead and claims that in key swing states the gap is even bigger with 49 percent for Trump versus 42 percent for Biden, saying the result shows Trump has “an almost unassailable seven point lead.”

Democracy Institute director Patrick Basham said his poll confirms the Democratic Party misread the public about the violence stemming from the Black Lives Matter protests and their desire to see law and order restored.

“Joe Biden restated his support for peaceful protests but, crucially, condemned the violence that has come to dominate the months-long nationwide protest movement,” Basham told the Express.

Basham said the Democrats own internal polling showed “the overwhelming majority of Americans, including Black voters, are opposed to the organized anarchy … explicitly and implicitly cheered on by a considerable cabal of Democratic politicians, while an even larger number simply turned a blind eye.”

However, a poll published last week by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed that Trump’s approval rating is only 35 percent.

“That’s down from 43% in March but still within range of where Trump has been for much of his presidency. Where he falls within that range as Election Day nears could make a difference to his reelection prospects,” the AP report said.

A report earlier this year by the MIT Technology Review analyzed why most polls got the 2016 elections wrong when they predicted that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would easily defeat Trump.

For the November 2020 election pollsters are “intent on avoiding mistakes from past election cycles,” the report said.

The American Association for Public Opinion Research called the 2016 election “a jarring event for polling in the United States.”

“Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election came as a shock to pollsters, political analysts, reporters and pundits, including those inside Trump’s own campaign,” the association said in its analysis of the 2016 results.

“Some polls, indeed, had large, problematic errors, but many polls did not,” the analysis said, concluding that “there is no partisan favoritism in U.S. polling,” but rather a series of technical factors combined to lead many pollsters to underestimate support for Trump and reach the wrong conclusion.

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