WASHINGTON — A new national poll released Wednesday morning showed former Vice President Joe Biden had a 7-percentage-point lead over President Donald Trump in a potential 2020 match up.
The Morning Consult/POLITICO online poll of 1,993 registered voters was done between last Thursday and this Monday and after Trump said in a TV interview in July it would be a "dream" to run against Biden in two years.
The poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points, showed Biden receiving 44 percent of the support, Trump receiving 37 percent and 19 percent of respondents saying they were undecided at this early date (and without even knowing if Biden plans to run, as he hasn't said).
There are a couple of things this poll does and doesn't tell us. First, it continues a trend indicating Democrats have an edge on Trump: The poll showed a generic Democratic candidate scored slightly better than Biden even, with 48 percent support to 35 percent for Trump, with 17 percent undecided.
And it suggested that more than half of all younger voters -- up to age 44 -- clearly supported a generic Democrat (with Biden's support a little less than that but still well above Trump's), while Democratic support waned with older voters. (An equal share of voters -- 42 percent -- age 55-64 supported either side on the generic ballot; voters over that age supported Trump slightly, 45 percent to 42 percent for a generic Democrat. Biden's support among those age groups was slightly less.)
But even the top line result should be read with caution: The presidential race has not begun and we don't know who the candidates are for a race two years away. And including the margin of error, the potential spread between Biden and Trump may not be much different than it was between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
If the 2-point margin of error is subtracted from Biden's number and added to Trump's, the margin would be 42 percent for Biden and 39 percent for Trump -- a 3 percentage point difference. In 2016, Clinton won the national vote by just a little less than that -- 2.1 percentage points -- but still lost in the state-by-state Electoral College vote 306-to-232.
Trump won Michigan by three-tenths of a percentage point (or less than 11,000 votes out of 4.8 million cast).
Contact Todd Spangler at 703-854-8947 or at tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter at @tsspangler.
