Poll: Joe Biden and Donald Trump Statistically Tied in Florida
President Donald Trump and Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden are statistically tied in the key battleground state of Florida according to a poll released by the Florida Atlantic University Business and Economics Polling Initiative (FAU BEPI) on Tuesday.
“Biden holds a 49 percent to 46 percent lead, with 5 percent undecided, but those undecideds are breaking for Trump 4:1, resulting in a statistical tie at 50 percent for each candidate,” according to a press statement that accompanied the release of the poll.
The poll of 631 registered voters was conducted September 11 and September 12 and has a margin of error of 3.8 points.
In May, the same poll showed Biden with a six-point lead over President Trump, 53 percent to 47 percent.
Officials with the FAU BEPI poll said that the presidential race in the Sunshine State remains tight, but momentum appears to be with the president.
“Florida continues to be too close to call, but the enthusiasm still favors President Trump, and that could be the difference,” Dr. Kevin Wagner, a research fellow of the FAU BEPI and a professor and chairman of the political science department at Florida Atlantic University, said.
“With only 5 percent of the voters undecided, this election is less about persuasion and more about turnout,” Wagner added.
Professor Monica Escaleras, director of the FAU BEPI, noted that the improving economy is helping the president.
“The economy is still the No. 1 issue for voters, so that might explain why Trump has seen a bounce-back in the state,” Escaleras said.
When asked when they believed the final results of the 2020 presidential election will be known, poll respondents answered as follows:
- 38 percent said on election night
- 31 percent said the following day
- 22 percent said within the following week
- 9 percent said more than one week later
Fifty-six percent of poll respondents were women and 43 percent were men. Democrats were 37 percent of poll respondents, while Republicans were 35 percent, and 47.2 percent of respondents said they voted for Donald Trump in 2020, while 46 percent said they voted for Hillary Clinton.
The Real Clear Politics Average of Polls currently shows former Vice President Biden with a narrow 1 percentage point lead over President Trump in Florida.
President Trump narrowly won Florida’s 29 electoral college votes in his 2016 victory over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton by 120,000 votes, just 1.3 percent of the more than nine million votes cast. In the final tally, President Trump received 49.1 percent of the votes cast, while Hillary Clinton received 47.8 percent of those votes.
Keeping Florida’s 29 electoral college votes in the president’s column in the 2020 presidential election is seen as critical to his re-election game plan.
The electoral college count on election day in 2016 was 306 for President Trump and 232 for Hillary Clinton. If every other state were to remain the same in 2020, a loss by the president in Florida would reduce his electoral college total to 277 votes, just seven more than the 270 needed to win the presidency with an electoral college majority.
With such a slim margin, the president could ill afford to lose any other state in 2020 that he won in 2016.
In contrast, a win in Florida would give the president a stronger electoral college base and set the stage for an even larger electoral college majority in 2020 than was the case in 2016, with key battleground states that went for Hillary Clinton in 2016–most notably Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Nevada–now in play.