Two polls released on Tuesday show that presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden’s lead over President Donald Trump has slipped in the key battleground state of Minnesota.
A Trafalgar Group poll of 1,129 likely voters conducted between July 23 and July 25 with a 2.8 percent margin of error shows that Biden’s lead has slipped to five points, 49 percent to 44 percent, while a Morning Consult poll shows his lead has slipped to three points.
A Fox News poll released last week had Biden’s lead at 13 points. A Gravis poll released in June showed Biden with a 16-point lead.
Minnesota’s ten electoral college votes are expected to play a key role in determining the winner of the 2020 presidential election.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton narrowly won the state and its electoral college votes, defeating Donald Trump by a mere 44,000 votes, a 1.5 percent margin.
Unlike 2016, when the Trump campaign devoted few resources to winning the state, the president’s re-election campaign has spent the past two years building a get-out-the-vote infrastructure in the state, which remains deeply divided between the far left progressive urban area of Minneapolis-St.Paul and the more conservative rural areas. Those divisions have deepened in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd while being taken into custody by the Minneapolis Police Department in May, and the subsequent riots that left many parts of Minneapolis-St. Paul decimated.
On May 31, Politico described Minnesota as “the most volatile swing state of all,” and the latest results from the Trafalgar Group poll and the Morning Consult poll are consistent with that characterization.
The Morning Consult poll results in Minnesota are especially interesting because the trend of declining support for Biden in that state runs counter to the trend identified in several other battleground states in which Morning Consult also released polling results on Tuesday.
Morning Consult conducted polling in twelve key battleground states using a methodology that reflects “a 10-day moving average of vote share among likely voters in each state. Surveys were conducted between July 17 and July 26, 2020.”
“President Donald Trump faces an increasingly daunting electoral map according to new battleground state polling from Morning Consult Political Intelligence,” Nick Laughlin wrote in the summary of Tuesday’s release from Morning Consult/Political Intelligence. “Trump has seen his lead evaporate in certain must-win states, such as Florida and Texas, and he doesn’t hold a lead outside the margin of error in any of the 12 states included in this release.”
In Minnesota, the Morning Consult poll found that Joe Biden’s lead over President Trump is just three points, 47 percent to 44 percent, which is within the poll’s 3.8 percent margin of error. (The poll included responses from 662 likely voters).
The Morning Consult poll showed Trump leading Biden by three points in Ohio, tied in North Carolina, and trailing Biden by anywhere from 1 point to 13 points in the battleground states of Arizona (Biden +7), Colorado (Biden +13), Florida (Biden +3), Georgia (Biden +1), Michigan (Biden +10), Pennsylvania (Biden +7), Texas (Biden +2), Virginia (Biden +10), and Wisconsin (Biden +7).