The latest polling out of New Hampshire and Pennsylvania is mostly good news for a Trump campaign looking to hold all of its 2016 territory and expand beyond that.
President Donald Trump shocked the world in 2016 by breaking through what the media “experts” assured us was the Democrats’ impenetrable blue wall of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Trump won all three of those states and went on to trounce Hillary Clinton in the electoral college.
Trump also almost won New Hampshire. Hillary barely took the state by just one-third of a point.
A Morning Call poll out of Pennsylvania released Thursday shows Trump either beating or tying every likely Democrat candidate except Bernie Sanders. The Jurassic Marxist is up three points.
In that all-important state that will be hotly contested, Trump ties Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren 47 to 47 percent, beats Mike Bloomberg 48 to 45 percent, and beats Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar by a single point.
Almost all of the polling out of Pennsylvania has so far shown Democrats with a small but stubborn single-digit lead.
In New Hampshire, the Granite State poll finds that Trump ties Sanders at 46 percent; wallops Bloomberg by 14 points, 47 to 33 percent; bests Biden 44 to 46 percent; beats Klobuchar 45 to 44 percent; and loses to Buttigieg 42 to 48 percent.
Until this poll, Democrats have been polling pretty strongly against Trump in New Hampshire.
Morning Call’s Pennsylvania poll surveyed 424 registered voters between February 12 and 20. The margin of error is 5.5 percent.
The Granite State poll is of 611 adults and was taken between February 19 and 25. The margin of error is four percent. Note: polls of “adults” usually give Democrats an advantage of a few points, which doesn’t reflect the registered and likely voters who show up on Election Day.
When you look at Trump’s rising national approval numbers, it only makes sense that this would transfer over to the individual states, most especially the swing states.
According to the RealClearPolitics poll of national polls, the president’s national approval rating sits at a healthy 46.4 percent, the highest of his presidency. His disapproval rating has dipped to 50.4 percent, its lowest level in three years, since the first few weeks of his administration. The four-point margin between that approve/disapprove number is also the best in three years.
We still have a long way to go, and a lot can still happen, but Trump is proving there was more upside in his approval rating than a lot of “experts” believed.
Trump is also stuck in the White House as the Democrats and media assault him with smears and lies 24/7. Once he’s on the campaign trail making his case, flogging his record, and contrasting himself to whatever extremist the Democrats choose to run with, things will get truly interesting.
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