Why the Polls Are Alarming for Donald Trump | The New Yorker
In the past two months, Trump hasn t led in a single national poll. The FiveThirtyEight general-election database contains the results of hundreds of surveys, and the last one showing Trump in front of Biden nationally was conducted by Change Research on April 2nd and 3rd a moment at which Bernie Sanders was still contesting the Democratic primary. Back in 2016, Trump trailed Hillary Clinton in the vast majority of national surveys, too. But, during the two-month period from April 9th to June 9th of that year, he led in five of them, including a poll in May from ABC News/Washington Post that got quite a bit of attention. Since early April of this year, every single national poll in the FiveThirtyEight database, including some that tend to lean Republican, has shown Biden ahead.
Biden s lead appears to be growing. Two months ago, the R.C.P. poll average showed the former Vice-President leading Trump by 6.3 percentage points nationally. Since Monday, Biden has been ahead by eight percentage points. During the past week and a half, four surveys have shown Biden with double-digit leads, and three of them from Monmouth University, ABC News/Washington Post, and CNN have been wholly or partly conducted by telephone, which is generally considered a more reliable method than online surveys. Two other recent telephone surveys from NBC News/Wall Street Journal and