Big Mo has raised its head in a very big state for Democrat hopes ... and not in a good way. A new poll from AARP -- not exactly a MAGA-friendly joint -- shows Joe Biden now trailing outside the margin of error in both head-to-head and full ballot matchups against Donald Trump. And it's not a post-debate outlier, either:
Former President Trump holds a 6-point lead over President Biden on the full ballot: 44% - 38%. RFK Jr. gets 9%, other candidates 4%, and 5% are undecided. Trump is up 50% - 45% on the head-to-head ballot.
Trump has similar mid-single digit leads on the full ballot among voters under 50 and 50+, though voters under 50 are much more likely to choose a third party option. There is a larger difference between those two age segments on the head-to-head ballot where Trump is up 9-points among the 50+ but only 1-point among those under 50.
This is driven primarily by voters 18-34, who vote Trump by 6-points on the full but Biden by 2-points on the head-to-head. 27% of voters 18-34 vote 3rd party.
The poll, conducted for AARP by Fabrizio/Anzalone, uses a sample of 600 likely voters, so it's substantial. The crosstabs are somewhat eye-popping, too. Trump is winning indies outside the margin of error in both formulations, and wins nearly every age demo as well. The most surprising and telling figures are in the gender gap, however. Trump maintains strength among male voters that far exceeds his gap among women (+19, -7 H2H, +22/-8 full ballot). If Trump gets within single digits with women, Democrats may as well give up now and focus down-ballot.
Speaking of which, the same poll shows Tammy Baldwin leading her Republican challenger by five points in the Senate race, 50/45. This shows Wisconsin voters being very discerning in their support for incumbents, and more importantly demonstrates that this poll didn't get an obviously biased sample. The takeaway here is that Biden's really doing this badly in comparison with other Democrat incumbents on the same ballot, at least so far. That might be a slender ray of hope for Democrats, but the more Biden stumbles from here out, the harder it will be for voters to remain this discerning about support for those participating in the Biden cover-up.
This also doesn't look out of range of other post-debate polling. Four pollsters have surveyed Wisconsin since the debate, and only Bloomberg/Morning Consult sees Biden up, 47/44. Remington, a GOP outfit, shows Trump up six points, while Emerson shows Trump up three. And as RCP's aggregate tracker graph shows, the inflection point for this is very, very obvious:
Looking at the data and talking with voters, Politico scoffs at Biden's complaint that it's the "elites" that want to push him out of office, at least in Wisconsin:
Voters and local candidates in Wisconsin have a message for President Joe Biden: It’s not just Democratic elites who are freaking out about your mental acuity.
Biden on Monday suggested it was simply the “the elites in the party” raising doubts about his political viability after a halting, incoherent debate performance last month. In fact, questions about his age are dominating the political conversation in and around Milwaukee and Madison, crucial turf for Democrats in November, according to conversations with roughly two dozen Democrats and independent voters over the course of the past four days. The concerns come as a new AARP poll has Biden down five points to former president Donald Trump in the critically important swing state, and as Republicans prepare to formally nominate Trump in Milwaukee next week.
If you count George Clooney, then yes, the elites want him out too. But clearly, the hoi polloi has decided that they don't like being gaslit over Biden's cognitive decline, and they're about to hold Biden accountable for it. If Democrats get lucky, Biden will be the only one to suffer for it ... but they don't look that lucky at the moment.
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