President Trump has his work cut out for him in one of the key states that handed him the presidency, according to a new poll from Emerson College.
Trump trails all five Democrats the poll tested in head-to-head matchups, and lags far behind the two best-known candidates in the field, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Biden and Sanders both lead Trump by 10-point margins at this point, 55 percent to 45 percent.
Trump fares significantly better against the other Democrats the poll tested — all those matchups are within the poll’s margin of error — but he doesn’t lead in a single one. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) leads him by four points, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) leads him by three and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) leads him by two in the survey.
That’s not a great place to be for the President in one of the three states that put him over the top in the Electoral College four years ago. Trump won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan by a combined 80,000 vote margin, and strategists in both parties say those states are the ones that will most likely determine the 2020 presidency.
Trump’s numbers remain underwater with Pennsylvania voters as well, with a 41 percent approval rating and 51 percent disapproving of his job performance.
A few caveats: First, head-to-head matchups right now are as much based on name recognition as anything, and once the 2020 Democratic primary actually plays out, the candidates’ standing may change dramatically — against one another and against Trump. Second, Emerson’s use of landlines with an online oversample to make up for a lack of cell phones is still a relatively new form of polling, though their recent polls with large enough sample sizes have proven to be as accurate as other public and private polls. The balance of landline callers in this poll is also higher than most other pollsters opt to use, and polls that find no undecided voters this far from election day may be pushing respondents too hard to pick a choice, leading to some hidden uncertainty in the numbers.
But these toplines are not a good sign for Trump.
The poll of 808 registered voters (565 landline users and 242 internet respondents) was conducted from March 26-28 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
