Latest Quinnipiac University National Poll

Top Dems Lead Trump In Head-To-Head Matchups; Democratic Primary Race Narrows As Biden Goes Flat

Trump’s support is really narrowing to uneducated white males. Biden wins every other demographic.

The biggest vulnerabilities for Trump:

1. Trump’s lack of support among the elderly was the biggest surprise in the results. Despite the best efforts of Fox News, Biden overwhelmingly defeats Trump among senior citizens, 56-39. That is distressing for the GOP because Trump defeated Clinton 52-45 in this demographic. If that keeps up, Trump can kiss Florida and Arizona good-bye, and he can’t afford to lose those states. Without those two states, his 2016 electoral total would have been 264 – not enough to win.

2. White women have turned against the president. Trump won this demo 52-43 in 2016, but is now trailing Biden 51-43.

34 thoughts on “Latest Quinnipiac University National Poll

  1. Gent, the national popular vote isn’t mythical. It exists. It just isn’t the vote that decides the election. But the candidate that wins the popular vote nearly always wins the electoral college vote as well. The candidate that won the popular vote hadn’t lost the election since 1888 (Benjamin Harrison), until Al Gore in 2000. Of course,I now that’s happened twice in the last 20 years. Unsurprisingly, this has caused many people (mostly Democrats) to support a constitutional amendment abolishing the electoral college and electing the president via the popular vote. I don’t see such an amendment ever being ratified by 3/4 of the states, if for no other reason then more than 1/4 of the states have smaller populations and thus have outsized political influence. But the media will continue to report on the national popular vote because people are interested in which candidate got the most votes.

  2. You guys are predicating your win/loss opinions on the ‘mythical’ popular vote. America DOES NOT elect the President by a people’s vote, no matter how badly you want it to be. Arguments both for and against the Electoral College have been made for decades, the against usually being waged by the party that just lost.

    The fact remains that until or unless we change, through a Constitutional Amendment, the method by which we elect the President, the one who wins is the one who gets the most Electoral votes, no matter how badly you disagree.

    This idiotic scheme that the Dems have come up with this time for states to hold their electoral votes until after the ‘popular’ vote has been determined is not only, in all likelihood unconstitutional, but is seriously flawed and will cheat 75% of the nation’s voters out of their vote. I am pretty certain that if it gets enough signers and actually makes an impact on the 2020 vote, the vote will be challenged in court which will do only one thing – it will keep us from having a President until after the court cases are all settled. It will be Election Year 2000 on steroids.

    I’m trying to be as rational here as possible when I say the Framers KNEW there would be arguments like this and that’s one of the reasons they created the EC to begin with. They were some very smart guys.

    1. He was not elected after being Vice President, he ascended to the Presidency because of JFK’s assassination then ran for his own term in 1964. He declined to run in 1968.

      1. I think you mean something different from what you are saying. LBJ was elected to the presidency after being vice-president (although he was not vice-president at the time of the election.) You need to re-phrase your point more precisely.

      2. As Scoopy says below, your phrasing was imprecise. And your statement from above, i.e., ” couldn’t run for another term (22nd Amendment)” is simply incorrect.

  3. 1.Al Gore probably won in 2000.

    2.LBJ could have run again because he became President after the 1962 midterms. The rules on a Vice President who assumes the Presidency (it’s the same rule in many states where a Governor steps down) is that if they assume the office before the midterm they can only serve out the rest of that term and one more term. If they assume the office after the midterm, they can complete that term and run for two full terms.

  4. Gman – I did not mis-state. Maybe you were looking at a poll that said Trump had a 29% chance, but the ABC News poll I saw over the weekend before the election estimated (GUESStimated?) that Trump had something like a 3% chance of winning. They were even speculating what Hillary was going to do as the Nation’s first woman President. I am not saying your number or memory is wrong, I’m just saying that polls, as a rule, are all but useless, especially this far away from the election.

    Polls can be made to say anything the pollster wants them to say. You want me to create a poll that says AOC will be the next President? Easy. I just poll 1500 registered Democrats and see what they say.

    There is no law that says a poll has to be honest or even-handed.

    1. Again, Gent you are confused about your facts and definitions. National polls do not predict electoral votes. What you are calling a “poll” is somebody’s analysis or interpretation of various data. As I noted, the national polls, which predicted the popular vote, called the race almost perfectly, missing the popular vote by only a single percentage point. It was possible to conclude from them that Trump had almost no chance to win the popular vote, and that was correct.

      Because of the statistical authority necessary, a national polling organization like Q would have to spend vast amounts of money to be able to predict the results in each state. Without doing the numbers, I think you might need to have a nationwide sample of close to 100,000 people to predict state-by-state results, whereas a representative national sample of a couple thousand can predict the popular vote quite accurately. The statistical puzzle is that a sample of a couple thousand is also necessary to obtain a reasonable MOE on a state vote – so multiply that times 50 and the cost becomes enormous.

      538 did attempt to take all the local data and compile it, but as we used to say in business analysis, GIGO.

      The other issue with polls is that they show a temporal snapshot. We like to think that a poll taken from November 1-7 will be a decent predictor of what will happen on November 8, but the mood of the country can change quite rapidly pursuant to certain events. As an obvious example, Hillary lost 2.5 points in polls in the battleground states between October 28th and November 7th. At least three states (Arizona, Florida and North Carolina) flipped from blue to red in that period. (Comey’s infamous announcement happened on the 28th.) And as a rule, those “November 7” polls were taken over a period of days, so some of the interviewees were polled closer to the 28th than to the 7th, thus failing to show the full extent of the red-shift. If somehow, magically, statistically significant polls in every state could have been based solely on November 7th interviews, many people might have predicted a Trump victory, but alas, such a production is financially unsound. Who would care enough about that specific info to pay for it? And their money might even be wasted in the case of a four-person election like 2016, because even such a dream poll would not be able to account for the people who say they will vote for a third-party candidate on the 7th, but do not actually do so on the 8th.

      Lacking such precise up-to-the-minute info, the pollsters and their statisticians have to do the best they can with what they have. Given that, the fact that they cumulatively missed the popular vote by only 1.2 points is impressive.

      1. And yet, Hillary still lost an election that nearly all the so-called ‘experts’ said she couldn’t lose. Explain that.

        1. That’s because the “experts” you are citing don’t really have any expertise. They are just talking heads who go on television and natter on to fill air space.

          The real experts, like Nate Silver, did not say Hillary couldn’t lose. (And it fact refused even to make a call, for which the talking heads excoriated him.) His site, 538, gave Trump a 29% chance, and 29% chances happen with great frequency. If a so-so batter is standing in against a pitcher, he has a 29% chance of getting on base. That does not mean he could not possibly reach base. It only means he is more likely not to. Trump had the same chance of winning the election as a batter does of getting on base. As it turns out, he got on base, as batters frequently do. The pitcher does not always win the match-up, even though the batter has only a 29% chance.

  5. You are assuming that the people vote directly for the President. That is wrong. Read the Constitution, Art. 2, Sec. 1, Ppg 2.

    Given that, the polls that measure the mythical “Popular Vote” have no bearing on the matter whatsoever.

  6. During the panel discussion on Special Report this evening, Brett Baier showed Quinnipiac polls taken in the June before the election years of 1992, 1996, 2004, and 2012. Every president was well behind generic opponents of the opposite party, with one exception. Care to guess the only president the polls said would be reelected? Yup. George H.W. Bush was ahead by 23 points against a generic Democrat. Clinton, W, and Obama were all trailing. The fact that this pole had Bernie something like 9 points ahead of Trump is ridiculous. Yesterday, Bernie decided to give a speech defending socialism. There WAS good economic news out of Venezuela yesterday. Inflation has finally fallen (barely) below 1 million percent. I won’t say Bernie couldn’t beat Trump, because Trump is just so awful he might lose to an avowed socialist. But he would never lose by 9 points. If he did it would be a good time to move Denmark. At least they respect capitalism there.

    1. That’s interesting, but irrelevant to the current polls. Polls against generic opponents can’t be compared to polls against named opponents. It would be relevant if Baier had used polls of comparable periods matching those presidents against their final opponents.

      As for G.H.W. Bush, he was probably running a 75% approval rating in June of 1991, so it’s no surprise that he was expected to defeat any generic opponent. Two major things changed: (1) within a year his approval rating dropped into the twenties; (2) he had to run against two opponents. Even with his declining approval rating, I think he’d probably have kicked Clinton’s ass without Ross Perot in the running. Bill Clinton got only 43% of the popular vote and won. His wife got 48% and lost!

      1. I think the point of those polls is that quite a bit can change in the next 17 months. But this months polls confirm what an awful lot of us are thinking: it seems inconceivable that Trump could possibly win again. But since it was inconceivable he could win in the first place, who knows? I certainly don’t want to vote for him. In 2016, for the first time in my life I voted against a Republican candidate for president. I was both depressed and infuriated because it seemed like such a lost opportunity.
        It seemed to me any other candidate could beat Hillary that year and I couldn’t even root for the Republican. There are many things I like about the Trump administration even as there are many other things I hate (especially the president). If the Dems nominate someone like Bernie, I think Trump would win. I see silver linings in that. But I remember reading about many Democrats rooting for Ronald Reagan to get the GOP nomination in 1980 because he was so radical Carter could coast to victory. My nightmare is that Bernie is nominated and then beats Trump. That’s why I want Biden to get the nomination. I don’t particularly want him to be president, but from my perspective he may be the least bad choice.

      2. The other big difference between then and now; Trump’s approval ratings has unprecedented levels “strongly disapprove”. This points to a very motivated block of voters who won’t sit this one out because they aren’t crazy about either candidate.

        This is what makes Biden so electable; the left may not like him, but will show up to vote Trump out, while swing-voters (and perhaps a number of “never Trump” Republicans can stomach him as someone who can restore a certain level of normalcy.

        1. Here’s a random question about electability. When was the last time a Democrat who had been VP got elected president? You can’t really count Truman, he inherited the job. Someone look this up for me, I’m a lazy lazy man.
          My point is – it’s not that Biden’s very electable (even if he was, Hilary had buckets of “electable”, what did it get her?), it’s just that Trump is so very lame.

          1. Truman or LBJ should both count as you phrased your question, because both were elected in their own right to a full term after ascending from the VP post. For the record, the last time anyone who served as VP was elected was Bush the Elder in 1992.

            If you want the answer to what you meant rather than what you asked, it looks like the answer is Martin Van Buren all the way back at the dawn of the Democratic party.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Vice_Presidents_of_the_United_States

            This isn’t JUST that the GOP dominated the presidency from 1860 to 1932, I think that Nixon and Bush the Elder are the only VPs who were elected in their own right without succeeding their president since Van Buren.

          2. That would have to be LBJ, as JFK’s VP, but he got to be President by default, so to speak but then got elected on his own in 1965 but couldn’t run for another term (22nd Amendment).

          3. Yeah, William, same deal there as Truman – he got elected running as the incumbent, which is an easier lift.

            I haven’t found a D who has done what Biden wants to do, a least as far back as McKinley.

            Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

          4. ;-|…

            LBJ declined to run in 1968, there was no constitutional bar to his doing so.

          5. Thanks JJF for finding that. Biden does have a certain Swamp Fox-iness to him, so that will fit if it’s him. Please god: don’t let it be him.

  7. I’m old enough to remember when the polls had Michael Dukakis leading George Bush by 17 points. Polls at this stage don’t mean much. I like Biden fine, but nobody loves him, and his two previous Presidential runs failed spectacularly. I would rank Biden as only the slight favorite right now. Imagine if the Republicans had a smart leader who actually understood how to reach out and build coalitions…

    1. I’m old enough to remember when the polls in the week before the 2016 election stated FOR A FACT that Trump had literally no chance of defeating Hillary (3% at best) and that she was a certain shoo-in for President….

      1. We’ve been through this before. The polls were not wrong at all. National polls measure the popular vote. They did indeed say Trump had no chance to win the popular vote, and they were completely correct. He did not come close. The final polls before the 2016 election (RCP average) showed Hillary willing by 3.3%. She actually won by 2.1%. The small difference was attributable to the people who got cold feet on election day and abandoned Stein and Johnson.

        Some people who interpret polls were wrong, but 538, which is the top analytical site, gave Trump a 29% chance to win, and refused to call the election either way because of the ground made up by Trump in the final month.

        But the point is that the national polls were quite accurate, although some people interpreted them poorly.

        1. To add, because The Gent seems to not have understood previously, if one has a 29% chance of winning anything, that’s essentially a 1/3 chance and far from “no chance”. It was the rough equivalent of rolling a 6-sided die and landing on 1 or 2.

          The Gent, is this clear now or are you going to continue to misstate what happened?

          1. He’s gonna ignore the correction, so he can make the same BS claim next time. Rinse, repeat.

  8. I think everyone oughta jump on the one-eyed goat bandwagon while there’s still room. Goatmentum! I’m picturing Klobuchar as his (or her, no need to be sexist) running mate.

  9. I have no faith in the likelihood of the Democrats not putting up a one-eyed goat.
    And with the number of candidates out there some of the better prospects may well cannibalize each other.
    Biden, Warren, Harris, and Bernie are all candidates who would elicit a notable lack of support and votes from elsewhere in their party – just like Clinton.
    The presumed front-runner Biden is a hack and a finger-in-the-winder. He’d almost certainly not be a Republic-threatening catastrophe like Trump so he’d be a better President but as my old man would say “That’s like comparing poor with piss-poor”.
    It doesn’t look great for the Orange Buffoon, but then again it didn’t look great for him in ’16 either.

  10. I think something that often gets lost in all the discussion of the 2016 voting is just how disliked Hillary was, even among a sizable percentage of the liberal bloc. I really do think that this combined with the fact that it was “impossible” for Trump to win made him a safe protest vote, if they showed up to vote at all. They probably won’t make this mistake next time.

    We’ll see. If true that means the Democrats could run a one eyed goat (or even Hillary again) in 2020 and win by a landslide.

    It is also possible that I have, once again, overestimated my fellow Americans.

    1. Yes. Many people seemed to have been voting against HRC rather than voting for DJT. (This supports claims that things like Russian propaganda and Comey’s handling of the late email discovery lead to her defeat.)

      I heard someone (can’t recall who) put it very succinctly: 2016 was a referendum on Hilary Clinton. 2020 is a referendum on Donald Trump.

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