Ahead of the November 3 US elections, fresh polls from battleground states show that Joe Biden is holding a clear lead over President Donald Trump. This has been the trend for some time now. National polls, which show a candidate's popularity in the country as a whole, has Joe Biden in a clear lead of around 10 points. However, the reliability of such polls is in question as, in 2016, they had shown Hillary Clinton as the most popular candidate.
But, statewide polls in the recent days have given us a clearer picture. In the battleground states, which more often than not decides elections, Joe Biden holds a clear advantage over Trump. CNN reported that Biden holds an advantage in the upper midwest states of Wisconsin and Michigan, but the race between Biden and President Trump is tighter in the battlegrounds of Arizona and North Carolina. Trump won all four of these states in 2016, and a loss on Tuesday in any of them would make his narrow path to 270 electoral votes more difficult. Should Biden's lead hold in three of the four states tested in the survey, it would almost certainly be enough to win, and if he were to carry Florida, he would most likely need to flip just one more large state that Trump won in 2016 to clinch the presidency over Clinton.
In Michigan, 53 per cent of voters support Biden to Trump's 41 percent. In Wisconsin, 52 per cent support Biden and 44 per cent Trump. In North Carolina, Biden's lead is narrower. He leads Trump 51 to 45 percent.
Polls conducted by The New York Times also showed broadly similar results. Biden, 77-year-old the former vice president, is ahead of Trump, a Republican, in the northern battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as in the states of Florida and Arizona. His strength is most pronounced in Wisconsin, where he has an outright majority of the vote and leads Trump by 11 points, 52 per cent to 41 per cent, the Times reported on Sunday, two days ahead of the presidential election.
Biden's performance across the electoral map appears to put him in a stronger position heading into election day than any presidential candidate since at least 2008, when in the midst of a global economic crisis Barack Obama captured the White House with 365 electoral college votes and Biden at his side.
-Inputs from agencies
