NEW YORK (Reuters) - Republican President Donald Trump trails Democrat Joe Biden among registered voters in three Midwestern battleground states that he narrowly carried in 2016 and are seen as crucial to winning November’s election, according to an Ipsos public opinion poll conducted exclusively for Reuters.
The poll, which ran from April 15-20 in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, showed 45% of registered voters said they would support Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, while 39% said they would support Trump.
It also found that Biden, vice president under Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, has an advantage of 3 percentage points among registered voters in Wisconsin, 6 points in Pennsylvania and 8 points in Michigan.
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The Ipsos poll shows Biden has maintained or slightly improved his lead over Trump in those states over the past few months, even though his campaign and the presidential primaries have been sidelined by the coronavirus pandemic. The United States has the most confirmed cases and deaths in the world with at least 821,000 people infected and at least 46,000 deaths.
Biden’s advantage in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania over Trump averaged 3 to 4 percentage points in February and March, according to an aggregation of survey results by Real Clear Politics.
That would also suggest that Trump has not experienced an uptick in support in the Midwest, even though he has commanded the public’s attention at the helm of the federal response to the coronavirus crisis and sought to cast himself as a “wartime president” fighting an invisible enemy.
A separate Reuters/Ipsos poll found on Tuesday that Biden has an 8-point advantage over Trump nationally, as support for him rose nationally in each of the last three weeks while disapproval of Trump’s response to the pandemic grew.
To be sure, anything can happen with several months to go before the Nov. 3 general election. State polls in 2016 showed Democrat Hillary Clinton enjoyed wide leads over Trump early in the election cycle in those same Midwestern states before she lost them to Trump on Election Day, all of them by less than a percentage point.
Trump is still a little more popular in the Midwestern battlegrounds than he is nationally, in part thanks to his appeal to some blue-collar white voters.
