Joe Biden Now Favored To Win Georgia After Poll Shows Him Up 7 Over Donald Trump, Expert Says
Joe Biden has moved into the lead in Georgia, a state that is normally deep-red. A new poll showed him with a 7-point lead over Donald Trump, The Hill reported.
On Wednesday, a Quinnipiac University survey found that 51 percent of voters in the Peach Tree State favored the former vice president, while 44 percent backed Trump. The poll showed that Biden had grown his lead from September when he led by a 3-point margin in the same survey.
Quinnipiac pollster Tim Malloy said that Trump’s stronger performance in the previous election does not appear to have much bearing on this year’s race.
“For Trump, 2016 is a distant memory,” Malloy said. “Defeating Hillary Clinton by 5 points when the polls closed then, and now down 7 to Biden with three weeks to go. Warning lights are blinking red and alarms are going off in the Peach Tree state.”
The Hill noted that Quinnipiac has consistently shown Biden with larger margins than other pollsters, and other recent surveys of Georgia voters have shown a closer race. However, the newest poll was enough to tip the contest in favor of Biden in the FiveThirtyEight forecast for the upcoming election. The site, which aggregates and analyzes all polling data, turned the state a light shade of blue on Wednesday as it flipped out of Trump’s column.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight wrote that while Georgia is now favored to go to the Democratic candidate, it is still an extremely close race given the inherent advantages that Trump would have there.
“By the slimmest possible margin, I might caution,” he tweeted, referencing the advantage for the former vice president. “Biden has a 51% chance of winning Georgia and Trump 49%, per our forecast. Our model’s priors favor Trump in Georgia but there’s been enough good polling for Biden there to counteract them.”
The site showed that Biden’s overall advantage is growing. He has roughly an 85 percent chance to win the vote and is currently leading in a number of key battlegrounds like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Trump’s standing has fallen in the last few weeks as he came under criticism for his performance in the first presidential debate and his handling of the coronavirus pandemic after he tested positive for the virus.
Other polling has shown Biden with either in a small advantage or within striking distance in other states that have previously been Republican strongholds, including Texas and South Carolina. The former vice president’s campaign has scheduled events in some of these states, showing what some experts consider an aggressive approach to expanding the electoral map.
