Another wave of opinion polls released on Sunday showed US voters leaning to former US vice president Joe Biden over US President Donald Trump in Michigan, Florida and Arizona, three key states won by Trump in 2016.
Handling of the COVID-19 pandemic spells trouble for Trump, pollsters said, as US cases exceed 4.2 million and deaths are more than 146,900.
The US election is 100 days away, but early voting is to start in some states in as few as five weeks.
Photo: AFP
Biden is ahead in Arizona by 49 percent to 45 percent among registered voters, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS, a survey and market research firm.
Another Arizona poll released on Sunday, from NBC News/Marist, put Biden up by 5 percentage points, 50 percent to 45 percent.
Arizona voters said Biden would do a better job handling the COVID-19 outbreak and race relations.
Trump’s supporters were more enthusiastic than Biden’s, though — a factor that the US president and his re-election campaign have emphasized.
Democrats also enjoy a wide advantage in Arizona’s Senate contest between incumbent Republican Martha McSally and challenger Mark Kelly.
Kelly, a NASA astronaut and husband of former US representative Gabrielle Giffords, had a 12-point lead over McSally, 53 percent to 41 percent, after having a 3-point edge in March, NBC said.
Trump carried Michigan in 2016 by a narrow 10,704-vote margin. The new CNN poll put Biden on top there by 52 percent to 40 percent.
Another poll released on Sunday, from CBS/YouGov, showed Biden leading by 6 points.
About 70 percent of Michigan’s registered voters reported disliking how the US president handles himself personally. Biden is only mixed on that measure himself, but does better than Trump by double digits.
Some surveys have shown that when voters dislike both candidates, more are leaning toward Biden.
CBS showed Trump up by 1 point over Biden in Ohio after winning the state by 8 points in 2016.
Much of Biden’s support in Michigan and Ohio came from people who are mainly voting against Trump rather than for Biden, CBS said.
In Florida, Biden is ahead 51 percent to 46 percent, according to the CNN survey. Like Arizona, Florida is dealing with a rapid rise in the level of coronavirus infections.
The RealClearPolitics summary of major polls, including those released on Sunday, shows Biden up by 4 points in Arizona, 8.4 points in Michigan and 7.8 points in Florida.
The CNN polls were conducted from July 18 to Friday among registered voters and had a margin of error of 3.8 percentage points.
About 873 registered voters were polled in Arizona, 880 in Florida and 927 registered voters in Michigan.
The NBC-Marist poll was taken from July 14 to Wednesday among 826 registered voters and had a margin of error of 4.1 percentage points.
The CBS-YouGov survey was conducted from Tuesday last week to Friday, with a 3.4 percentage point margin of error among registered voters in Michigan, and 3.6 points among registered voters in Ohio.
DISPUTED WATERS: The Philippines accused China of building an artificial island on Sabina Shoal, while Beijing said Manila was trying to mislead the global community The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) is committed to sustaining a presence in a disputed area of the South China Sea to ensure Beijing does not carry out reclamation activities at Sabina Shoal (Xianbin Reef), its spokesperson said yesterday. The PCG on Saturday said it had deployed a ship to Sabina Shoal, where it accused China of building an artificial island, amid an escalating maritime row, adding two other vessels were in rotational deployment in the area. Since the ship’s deployment in the middle of last month, the PCG said it had discovered piles of dead and crushed coral that had been dumped
Experts have long warned about the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI) going rogue, but a new research paper suggests it is already happening. AI systems, designed to be honest, have developed a troubling skill for deception, from tricking human players in online games of world conquest to hiring humans to solve “prove-you’re-not-a-robot” tests, a team of researchers said in the journal Patterns on Friday. While such examples might appear trivial, the underlying issues they expose could soon carry serious real-world consequences, said first author Peter Park, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in AI existential safety. “These
The most powerful solar storm in more than two decades struck Earth on Friday, triggering spectacular celestial light shows from Tasmania to the UK — and threatening possible disruptions to satellites and power grids as it persists into the weekend. The first of several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun — came just after 4pm GMT, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. It was later upgraded to an “extreme” geomagnetic storm — the first since the “Halloween Storms” of October 2003 caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged
Using virtual-reality (VR) headsets, students at a Hong Kong university travel to a pavilion above the clouds to watch an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated Albert Einstein explain game theory. The students are part of a course at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) that is testing the use of “AI lecturers” as the AI revolution hits campuses around the world. The mass availability of tools such as ChatGPT has sparked optimism about new leaps in productivity and teaching, but also fears over cheating, plagiarism and the replacement of human instructors. Pan Hui (許彬), a professor of computer science who is leading