National:
Florida-pres: A St. Pete Poll has Trump and Biden tied in the state, with Trump holding a narrowly positive 49-48 approval rating. Interestingly, Trump and Biden are all but tied with Hispanics here, which is a big improvement for Trump from his 20-plus point loss with them in 2016. The poll also gives Governor Ron DeSantis a 53-38 approval rating, which is strong but still a big drop from his pre-Covid highs.
President: A NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows Trump losing by 7 points to Biden, 49-42. This is actually down from a 9-point deficit in their previous poll, with most demographic spreads where you would expect them to be with a single-digit D lead. More telling however, is that a full 40% of people don’t have an opinion on Joe Biden’s coronavirus response, highlighting how little presence Biden has nationally right now. The poll also finds Americans are more worried that the country will open up too quickly than too slowly by about a 25-point margin.
President: A Harvard/Harris poll has Trump at 49-51 approval (the poll doesn’t do undecideds), tied for his best rating ever (and best since 2 months after inauguration). He still gets good marks on the economy and jobs, fighting terrorism, and has improved on foreign policy and government administration. The GOP is also sporting its best approval rating of Trump’s presidency (and first time it’s viewed more positively than the Democrats), at 48-52. However, Biden still leads with registered voters 54-46, and leads 52-48 with “very likely” voters, highlighting the fact that Trump’s gains in approval ratings haven’t actually transformed into better H2H numbers, at least not yet.
3rd-parties: The Virus is making the usual signature-gathering process for getting parties on the ballot harder. While this is impacting specific Republican and Democratic candidates in some places, it is also rippling through America’s 2 largest 3rd parties in the Greens and Libertarians, who are struggling to meet the requirements to get their party on the ballot everywhere….