The race for the White House is tightening, according to a new poll – with Joe Biden’s national lead dipping to just under 5 percent, and a much closer 3-percent margin in the battleground states.
The results of the IBD/TIPP tracking poll, released Saturday, give President Trump fresh hope for another Electoral College win, even if he loses the popular vote.
“Biden has a narrow 3-point edge in swing states, those six states decided by less than 2 points in 2016,” the survey by Investor’s Business Daily found.
Biden has 49.5 percent support nationwide in the poll of likely voters, compared to 44.7 percent for the incumbent — a 4.8 percent lead, well outside its 3.2 percent margin of error.
Trump gained almost a full percentage point on Biden from the poll’s Friday measurement, which found the Democrat with a 5.6 percent lead.
The survey has found a consistent but see-sawing Biden lead in recent weeks — with Trump only 2 points behind on Oct. 20.
But with Biden racking up large vote totals in safely blue regions like the northeast and the West Coast, his national lead could be deceiving.
In the midwestern swing states that once formed the Democrats’ solid “blue wall” — and which Trump flipped red in 2016 — Biden leads by only 2 percentage points, the survey found.
And among black and Hispanic voters, Trump has made substantial gains over his 2016 support. The poll found Trump with 48 percent of the Latino vote, neck-and-neck with Biden’s 50 percent — and with 13 percent of the African-American vote, a substantial improvement over the 8 percent who voted for him in 2016.
The IBD/TIPP poll, one of the most accurate of the 2016 presidential election, had Hillary Clinton with a 1-percent lead over Trump on the final weekend before Election Day.
POLL RESULTS
National: Biden 49.5% Trump 46.3%
Midwest: Trump 46.3% Biden 48.4%
Northeast: Trump 34.6% Biden 57.3%
South: Trump 49% Biden 45.6%
West: Trump 43.5% Biden 51%
source: IBD/TIPP tracking poll, Oct. 31
