Biden Is Underperforming Hillary in Battleground States

It still remains something of a mystery to me why there’s so little apprehension among liberal pundits and Democrats about the similarities between 2020 and 2016 polling in battleground states.

Consider Wisconsin:

The RealClearPolitics average had Clinton +6.5 in Wisconsin on Election Day. In August, she had been +11.5. Not a single poll featured on RCP during the 2016 campaign showed Trump winning the state. Biden has a + 3.5 average right now — which is to say, he is underperforming Clinton in the middle of a pandemic and economic collapse. This is the case in a number of battleground states. What happens if the coronavirus continues to ebb or the economy starts rebounding over the next couple of months? A new CNBC poll finds that as serious concerns about the coronavirus fell in six 2020 battleground states, approval of Trump’s handling of COVID-19 rose.

This average, incidentally, was taken before the Kenosha riots. As Wisconsin’s Dan O’Donnell points out to me, many Republicans in the state believe the August 2016 riots in Milwaukee over the shooting death of Sylville Smith (eventually ruled to be justified) played a role Trump’s win. It was around the time the race began to tighten. “Milwaukee is seen outstate as being wholly unlike the rest of the largely rural population because of its crime and Democrat policies,” O’Donnell says. “If people in, say, Appleton and Oshkosh (the other big swing area) and the heavily red suburbs think Milwaukee-style rioting could come to their cities next, Democrats are in big trouble here.”

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