CV NEWS FEED // Recent New York Times / Siena polls of registered voters show former President Donald Trump with a 12-point lead over President Joe Biden in the battleground state of Nevada.
Biden carried the state by just over two points in 2020.
Analysts attribute the drastic shift to the fact that Hispanic voters have been overwhelmingly trending toward Trump over the past few years. Roughly 20% of Nevada’s voters are Hispanic.
When only likely voters were surveyed, Trump’s lead in Nevada increased to 13 points.
The Times polls also show Trump with a healthy lead over the incumbent in a handful of other hotly-contested swing states. Trump is leading by 10 points in Georgia and is up seven points over Biden among registered voters in Arizona and Michigan. All of these states voted for Biden in 2020.
According to polls, Trump is also leading by three points in Pennsylvania – a state that voted for Biden by just over a point in 2020.
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The only battleground state where Biden has an advantage with registered voters per the Times polls is Wisconsin. The sitting president is leading there by just two points – well within the polls’ margin of error.
However, with only likely voters taken into consideration, Trump had a one-point lead over Biden in Wisconsin.
A relatively low proportion of Wisconsin’s population is Latino – especially when compared to other swing states.
Among just likely voters, Biden also had a razor-thin one-point lead in Michigan. That number represents an eight-point differential from the state’s results when the sample was composed from all registered voters.
The Times noted Monday that the results come as “a yearning for change and discontent over the economy and the war in Gaza among young, Black and Hispanic voters threaten to unravel [Biden’s] Democratic coalition.”
The polls’ “results were similar in a hypothetical matchup that included minor-party candidates and the independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” the Times continued. “[Kennedy] won an average of 10 percent of the vote across the six states and drew roughly equally from the two major-party candidates.”
During a Monday CNN segment, analyst Harry Enten called the newly-released polling numbers “an absolute disaster” for the Biden campaign.
“My goodness gracious,” Enten said, pointing to a graphic that showed Trump with a 13-point lead among Nevada’s registered voters. “That is a huge lead.”
“No Democrat has lost that state since John Kerry lost it back in 2004,” the analyst stated.
Enten pointed out that Trump was performing considerably better in the Sun Belt swing states (Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada) than in the Great Lakes swing states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). He attributed that difference to “the Trump coalition … changing.”
“Back in 2020, 84% of … the Trump coalition was white,” Enten said. “Look where it is now: it’s 78% [white]. The non-white portion of the Trump coalition, it was 13% in 2020 … now it’s 19%.”
“The Trump coalition is becoming more diverse, and of course those Sun Belt battleground states are more diverse than the Great Lake battleground states,” he said.
Enten concluded that the race in November is “advantage Donald Trump,” but still well in play for the Biden campaign.
