New Hampshire poll finds Biden up 8 points over Trump

Democratic nominee Joe Biden leads President Trump by 8 points in New Hampshire, according to a new survey.

The latest UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion poll finds Biden at 52 percent support and Trump at 44 percent, with 3 percent support for third-party candidates. One percent of voters are undecided.

In the same poll from October 2016, Hillary Clinton led by 6 points and 14 percent said they’d vote third-party.

Clinton edged Trump by less than 1.5 points, or fewer than 3,000 votes, in the state. George W. Bush was the last Republican to carry New Hampshire, in 2000.

“At this point in 2016, there were nearly five times as many third party or undecided voters, which indicated an unstable race,” said Joshua Dyck, director of the Center for Public Opinion and an associate professor of political science.

“This year is very different. Voters’ minds are made up and they have been for a while. That’s the sort of thing that happens when the race becomes a focused referendum on the incumbent,” Dyck said.

Trump’s campaign has circled New Hampshire as one of a handful of Clinton states that it believes it can flip in 2020.

There has not been much polling of New Hampshire this cycle but a recent New York Times-Siena College poll put Biden’s advantage at 3 points earlier this month.

The UMass poll found Biden with a 15-point lead among independents. Fifty-five percent of survey respondents disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president, including 62 percent of independents.

Fifty-eight percent of voters polled say the winner of the 2020 election should decide who replaces the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In the New Hampshire Senate race, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) leads Republican Corky Messner by 19 points, 56 percent to 37 percent.

The UMass poll of 657 likely New Hampshire voters was conducted between Sept. 17 and Sept. 25 and has a 4.6 percentage point margin of error.