Presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden is losing his lead over President Trump.
Since July 27, Biden’s margin has dropped by nearly three points in the Real Clear Politics Average and is now 6.4.
Though Trump has been closer to Biden before, and the Democrat has always expanded his lead in the polls after the president closes the gap, Biden’s lead has steadily declined, on average, since last September.
Question is, will Trump continue to narrow the lead heading into the final weeks of the campaign, and how much will Biden’s lurch to the hard left hurt him with moderate voters?
Latest Polls
Trump’s performance in three of the last four polls account for his closing in on Biden.
The latest Hill/Harris X poll, August 3-5, put Biden ahead of Trump 43-40, nearly within the margin of error, 1.84 points. The last Hill/Harris X survey gave Biden a seven-point lead.
A five-day Rasmussmen poll, July 29-August 4, also gave Biden a thin lead, 48-45. The margin of error was two points.
Biden beat Trump by four points in an Emerson poll of July 29-30, 50-46, with a 3.1-point margin of error.
Biden’s largest victory in the four surveys was nine points in an Economist/YouGov poll, August 2-4.
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Just about 10 days ago, Biden’s lead was 9.3 points, which is close to his all-time high margin of 11.5 through the past 12 months.
Trump approached within four points in mid-January just before the Chinese virus slammed the U.S. economy.
What Do the Polls Mean?
Biden might well expand his lead, then see it evaporate and Trump close to within a point or two several times in the coming months.
In late June 2016, the RCP aggregation gave Hillary Clinton a 6.8-point lead over Trump, who then pulled ahead by 1.1 points a month later.
Clinton expanded her lead to 7.7 points in early August, watched it dip to one point in September, then expand again to 7.1 on October 18.
Clinton held a 5.6-point lead on October 27, then dipped to less than two, then came out ahead in the RCP average on November 8. The score was 46.8-43.6, a 3.2-point margin.
Those polling data were accurate insofar as Clinton (officially) won the popular vote 48.2 percent to 46.1.
Her problem, of course, was the Electoral College. Taking 30 states plus Maine’s 2nd district, Trump tallied 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227.
Move to the Left
The same fate could well await Biden, who has moved to the hard left under pressure from the radicals in his party.
Biden’s silence on the riots, arson, vandalism, and statue destruction signals approval, which isn’t what mainstream Democrats, such as are left, likely expect from their presidential candidate.
Biden promised to pick a woman for his running mate, but that wasn’t enough. The party’s hard left wing demands a black woman, and last week he said he was considering four possible candidates. One name that surfaced was Karen Bass, who represents California’s 37th district in Congress.
The problem? In the past, Bass was a full-throated apologist for communist mass-murderer Fidel Castro and spent time in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, a front for Cuban intelligence.
Another problem for Biden might be his snuggling up to socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, another apologist for communist mass murderers, and Biden has even proposed ending American suburbs as we know them and forcing high-density housing for the poor into neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes.
“Biden’s plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned,” Betsy McCaughey reported in the New York Post.
Biden, McCaughey reported, will likely expand an Obama-era program that forced towns “to make it possible for low-income minorities to choose suburban living” and provide “adequate support to make their choices possible.”
Had the rule been implemented nationwide, towns everywhere would have had to scrap zoning, build bigger water and sewer lines to support high-density living, expand schools and social services and add mass transit. All pushing up local taxes. Towns that refused would lose their federal aid….
Biden and the equality warriors are using accusations of racism to accomplish something different. Their message is: You worked and saved to move to the suburbs, but you can’t have that way of life unless everyone else can, too….
Count on Trump to make Biden’s war on the suburbs a key issue in the election. In his Rose Garden news conference [on July 16], the president came out swinging, warning that Biden would “totally destroy the beautiful suburbs” by “placing far-left Washington bureaucrats in charge of local zoning.”
In other words, all those suburban moms who supposedly hate Donald Trump might not be so anxious to vote for Biden if they know he’ll plant a housing project packed to the rafters with squabbling “migrants” next to their 4,500-square-foot, five-bedroom home in the burbs.
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
