Biden has led Trump in every major national poll since April

A new poll released Friday shows Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden leading Donald Trump nationally by 11 points. Every other major nationwide poll since late April has also shown Biden ahead.

The survey of registered voters, conducted by NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Aug. 8-11, mostly before Biden announced his selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate, shows him leading Trump 53% to 42%. In June, the same poll showed Biden up by 8 points.

While the 11% margin is slightly larger than most other recent polls, almost every poll in the past four months has shown Biden ahead. According to RealClearPolitics, Biden has been ahead in 72 consecutive national polls — not including Friday’s — and he holds an average lead of 7.7% over Trump.

While the outlet lists two April polls that showed the race exactly tied, no poll on its list has put Trump ahead since February, before Biden had won a single primary.

All but one of the polls included since mid-May — a July poll by the GOP-friendly Rasmussen Reports — have shown Biden with a lead larger than Hillary Clinton’s 2.1% popular vote plurality in 2016.

Another data aggregation site, FiveThirtyEight, currently gives Biden an 8.4% lead in its polling average. It includes just one poll — an early April survey by Change Research — that put Trump ahead of Biden over the past six months.

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight’s founder and editor-in-chief, wrote Wednesday in a post titled “It’s way too soon to count Trump out” that Biden “currently has a robust lead in polls. If the election were held today, he might even win in a landslide, carrying not only traditional swing states such as Florida and Pennsylvania but potentially adding new states such as Georgia and Texas to the Democratic coalition.”

The poll released Friday found Trump’s approval at just 39% among adults nationwide, with 54% disapproving of his job performance.

It also found that Americans believe Biden would “better handle race relations as president” than Trump by a 58% to 34% margin and “better handle the coronavirus pandemic” by 53% to 37%.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.