Former Vice President Joe Biden continues to lead President Trump in the 2020 presidential election nationally by a substantial margin, according to the latest .
Biden leads Trump by 9 points, 52% to 43%, among likely voters, the survey finds. This is the first time this election cycle the poll has screened for likely voters 鈥� this narrower group is the most likely to actually cast a ballot, compared to the larger group of people who are registered to vote.
There isn't much change from registered voters, however. Among them, Biden leads Trump, 52% to 42%. That's mostly unchanged from last month in the survey taken just before the party conventions began, a reflection of how remarkably consistent this race has been in national polling. Of course, the election will be determined in key states rather than in a national popular vote.
When third-party candidates are included, it remains about the same. In a four-way race, adding Libertarian Jo Jorgensen and Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins, Biden leads Trump by a slightly lower 49% to 42%. Jorgensen pulls in 5%, while Hawkins gets 2%. Hawkins, however, has been rejected from the presidential ballot in some key states, including and .
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Against Trump, Biden shows strength among white voters with a college degree, especially white women; women overall; young voters; and those who live in cities and suburbs.
Trump's strengths are with white evangelicals; whites without a degree, especially white men without one; and those who live in rural areas or small towns.
With likely independent voters, Biden leads by 21 points, 57% to 36%. Trump by 4 points in 2016.
Notably, , Biden is again recording record support with white voters for a Democratic presidential candidate. Biden is getting 49% of white likely voters compared to 48% for Trump.
No Democratic presidential candidate has in the past five decades.
Biden also leads with likely voters who are 65 and older, 51% to 47%, a reversal from 2016 when Trump won them, 52%-45%, according to exit polls.
But a warning sign for Biden: He is underperforming with likely voters of color. While he leads Trump 60% to 34% with nonwhites, that's a smaller margin than the Democrat Hillary Clinton won with them in 2016.
(There were too few likely voters to report a breakout of African Americans and Latinos in this survey without the margin of error being too high, but the pollsters noted that the decreased margin for Biden was because of a weakness with Latinos.)
The survey researchers also found that Americans' votes are pretty locked in. Just 6% of voters were persuadable in the survey, measured as those who are undecided or who support a candidate but might vote differently.
Methodology
The poll, conducted from Sept. 11 through 16, surveyed 1,152 adults by cell phone and landline for a margin of error of +/-3.5 percentage points. There were 964 registered voters in the poll for a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points and 723 likely voters with a margin of error of +/- 4.3 percentage points.
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