Biden holds on to double-digit national lead in final USC poll

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden holds a 10-point lead over President Trump in the final USC Dornsfire Daybreak Poll released on Monday.

The lead is 3 points less than Biden’s 13-point gap over the president in September just after the first presidential debate but still shows the former vice president with a significant advantage nationally in the campaign’s final days.

“For me, the big news here is no news,” Bob Shrum, the director of the Center for the Political Future, said of the poll. “The race remains remarkably stable and if all the ballots are received and actually counted, Joe Biden is likely to win the popular vote by 9 to 11 points.”

The poll surveyed 3,647 people from Oct 20 to 31 and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

The same poll in 2016 showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton with a 2-point lead over Trump heading into the final days of the campaign. Clinton won the popular vote that year by just over 2 points but lost the Electoral College.

Biden held leads among independents, women, people of color and those with college educations. Among voters 18-39, Biden led by 18 points, while the vote was more evenly split among middle-aged and senior voters, with Biden leading by about 6 points in both ages 40-64 and those older than 65.

Trump lost some standing among men, whites and “other” voters, mainly Asian American and Native American, the report notes, when compared to how he did in 2016. White women who voted for Trump by 9 points over Clinton now have Biden at a 2-point advantage, though this falls in the margin of error.

“I’m particularly struck by what I would now call the hidden Biden voters — the noncollege-educated women who are voting in greater numbers for Biden than we would have expected based on the 2016 results,” Shrum said.

Seventy-two percent of the voters surveyed said they thought that Trump would challenge the vote if he lost, while 49 percent said the same of Biden. Of those surveyed, they said they thought the odds of violent unrest breaking out following the election results was higher if Trump were to win than if Biden won, 58 percent to 46 percent.