Polls after GOP convention show Trump remains the underdog

It didn’t really do much, if anything, according to the earliest high-quality polls we have.

New national polls released Wednesday from highly respected pollsters Ann Selzer, Suffolk University and Quinnipiac University show the race remaining largely as it has been in recent weeks. Joe Biden led by eight percentage points (49-41) in the Grinnell College/Selzer poll, which was conducted Wednesday through Sunday, including the final two days of the convention. Biden also led by seven points (50-43) in the USA Today-Suffolk poll and 10 points (52-42) in the Quinnipiac poll, both of which were conducted starting the day after the convention.

Each poll is very much in line with Biden’s average lead in the race, which hovered between seven and eight points for most of August.

Previous Suffolk polls show Biden with a slightly larger lead, but the last one was from June, when his 12-point lead was also similar to what was then his average lead. Quinnipiac also in early-mid July showed Biden ahead by 15 points. The race has narrowed slightly since then, but that was notably the case before the conventions and Kenosha.

Here’s a look at how high-quality polling has shifted since that previous Suffolk poll (with the period during which the conventions were held shaded):

High-quality national polling of the Trump-Biden race -- Polls spanning from the last USA Today/Suffolk University poll in late June to the new USA Today/Suffolk poll. (The period in which the Democratic and Republican National Conventions were held is shaded.)

The Suffolk poll, while showing a slightly narrower Biden lead than its last poll, suggests the Democratic convention was more appealing to political independents than the GOP convention. Independents said by 33-31 that the Democratic convention made them more likely to back Biden, while they said by 38-29 that the GOP convention made them less likely to back Trump. This could be because independents generally favor Biden anyway, but it suggests the GOP convention’s appeals to middle-of-the-road voters didn’t move the needle.

That was also the case among a few key groups focused on at the GOP convention.

Among voters in suburbia, whose livelihoods Trump has argued are at risk (he has even falsely said Democrats want to “abolish” the suburbs), Biden leads by 23 points in the Grinnell/Selzer poll. That’s higher than many polls conducted before the conventions, and remains a huge shift from 2016. Exit polls then showed Trump winning the suburbs by four points, while a validated voter survey from the Pew Research Center showed Trump carried them by two.

Biden also retains a huge edge among women, leading them by 22 points in the Grinnell/Selzer poll and 20 points in the Suffolk poll.

One area in which Trump may now be doing slightly better is among men, with whom he leads by six points in the Grinnell Selzer poll and by 12 points in the USA Today/Suffolk poll. That latter number is similar to his margin in the 2016 election (11 points), but some recent polls have suggested a very tight race among men.

Trump’s decision to feature a plethora of African American supporters at his convention doesn’t seem to have done much for his share of the Black vote. The Suffolk poll shows Trump losing it 82-4, albeit among a small subsample of the poll with a large margin of error. The Trump campaign predicted Tuesday that he would win at least 10 percent of the Black vote, which would be a slight improvement on the 6 to 8 percent he won in 2016.

The Suffolk poll also showed Trump losing the Hispanic vote 56-24 — again far different from the Trump campaign’s prediction Tuesday that he would take at least 40 percent of their votes. The Grinnell/Selzer poll didn’t break out Black and Hispanic voters individually, but it did show Trump trailing among non-White voters by 64 to 23, which is very similar to previous polls.

Interestingly, the Quinnipiac poll does show Trump flirting with the numbers predicted by his campaign — 11 percent with Black voters and 36 percent with Hispanics. But again, these are high-margin-of-error-groups, and those numbers have yet to be borne out in other high-quality polling. What’s more, the same poll showed Trump getting trounced among key groups with higher samples like college-educated White voters — a group which he won by three points in 2016 exit polls but in which he trails by a whopping 31 points. And he’s still losing by 10 points overall.

What might be most telling from the polls, though, is where Trump remains: in the low 40s. High-quality polls have for months shown Trump struggling to grow his base beyond that. He hasn’t crested 44 percent in the RealClearPolitics average since April.

The picture of the race, then, appears very similar to how it looked before the conventions. It’s true that the Democratic convention also doesn’t seem to have done much for Biden, but Trump is the one who is trailing and had more room (and need) to grow.

These national polls suggest the conventions didn’t really do much. We’ll have to see what other polling in the hours and days ahead shows — particularly in Wisconsin specifically and other key swing states that will decide the race.

Source:WP