National:
President: IBD poll has Biden up 3 points (45-42) on Trump, an increase from the tied election they had in their last poll. Trump’s approval rating also took a major dive (though from their probably-too-generous May poll that had him at 44-44), and his numbers on the economy and the virus response have taken a hit too. Still, the interesting long-term trend in this polls is that while Trump’s numbers in the head-to-head have been decently stable (with a small bump around January that faded recently), Biden’s been on a relatively steady downward trend, never dropping below 50% in their 2019 poll H-2-H but never rising above it in every one of their 2020 ones so far. There will be some very interesting poll dissections coming after the election this year, that’s for sure.
President-2: Here’s a weird poll—PRRI did a poll of about 1000 people, and broke the results down by a variety of groups. Amusingly, they have Trump doing better in so-called “Battleground” states than in “Republican States”, which just goes to highlight how weird and unrepresentative crosstabs can be some times. For comparison, in their last poll Trump did better in “Democratic States” than he did in “Battleground” ones, just to highlight how much these numbers have bounced around.
Trump: The Trump campaign is set to resume in-person campaigning soon, with a massive ground game and volunteer training operation set to start back up after sitting relatively idle for the past 3 months. One of the few advantages Trump has heading into this year has been a relatively consistent lead in voter enthusiasm over Biden, and Trump’s probably going to need to squeeze every possible vote he can out of an aggressive ground game if he wants to pull out a win in the end.
Veepstakes: Sabato breaks down what he thinks are the most likely candidates to be Biden’s VP—Namely, Harris, Demmings, and Duckworth. He considers the former a safe pick from a deep blue state that kinda flopped in the national spotlight, the second an unknown that checks most of the ideal boxes for a good VP, and the latter as invisible nationally despite what should be a fairly high-profile Senate spot….