Biden’s lead widens by 15 points over Trump: poll

Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman joins The Final Round to break down a recent poll taken by Quinnipiac University saying that Biden’s lead widen over Trump by 15 points, holding 52% over Trump’s 32% from the poll's data.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: All right, I want to get to another big story out today, and this comes down to, really, the presidential election year in just a couple of months. A new Quinnipiac Poll out showing that Joe Biden is leading President Trump by 15 points. In this new poll released today, Biden has 52% of the vote to Trump's 37%. It's the widest lead that we have seen so far from a Quinnipiac poll to date. And, Rick, I mean, a lot of this obviously has to do with how President Trump has handled the coronavirus outbreak. And once again, we're seeing President Trump continue to sink in the polls.

RICK NEWMAN: There is no good news in this poll from Quinnipiac, and Quinnipiac is-- they do a good poll, high-quality poll.

Let me just read one comment from one of the analysts there. "There is no upside, no silver lining, no encouraging trend hidden somewhere in this survey for the president."

And the thing that I noticed right away, you know, Trump has still been doing OK on his handling of the economy but not anymore. He's underwater now on that measure. So in June, more people said he was doing-- that they approved of his handling of the economy than disapproved. That was-- the net approval was 7%, positive 7%. And that has flipped to minus 9%. So the one thing Trump thought he had going for him was, even with the recession, voters thought he would be the better president to lead us out of the recession, better than Joe Biden would be, but they don't even seem to think that anymore, and it's not surprising. I mean, Trump really has not-- he doesn't have a plan for the coronavirus. He keeps trying to hide the information and deflect blame to mayors and governors, and I guess voters just aren't buying it.

ANDY SERWER: But, Rick, why were the polls wrong last time?

RICK NEWMAN: Well, you know, we've looked into that for our "Electionomics" podcast, and the answer is, at the national level, they were not wrong. They got the popular vote about right. At the state-by-state level and especially in the swing states, they did not account for undereducated voters enough. They weighted them too lightly, and that's why they did not pick up that Trump was going to beat Hillary Clinton in those states.

The pollsters have since made adjustments. They're aware of the problem. They're aware of skepticism such as yours, Andy. And I'm not saying they're going to get it 100% right this year, but they think they have fixed the problem from 2016.

SEANA SMITH: And also, Rick, it's going to be interesting to see how President Trump responds because when he doesn't like a poll, he's obviously not shy about it. A lot of times he criticizes the polling and basically says that it's not right. So it will be interesting just to see how he tries, it at all, he can spin this.

RICK NEWMAN: Yeah, and one of the important things here is if this is a close election, we could have a lot of problems on election day, partly because with all the mail-in ballots we're expecting, we may not know the outcome on election day if it's close. And then if we have to wait a week or 10 days for ballots from, you know, rural places or, you know, some forlorn district to be counted, that is just going to raise suspicion and give-- you know, Trump already says mail-in ballots are fraud.

If we have a wipe out one way or another, whether Biden wins big or Trump wins big, that would remove this thing many political analysts are concerned about, which is that we're going to have a real mess on our hands if it's a close election. So these poll results are suggesting maybe election day will go a little more smoothly than if it's close.

SEANA SMITH: All right, Rick, thanks so much for breaking that down for us.