Apair of new polls on Tuesday underscored the difficulty that Donald Trump’s campaign will have in eking out a victory as two red states fall into the tossup column. The news is made worse by the revelation that Joe Biden holds a fundraising advantage as the campaign enters its final phase.
In Georgia, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll showed Biden and Trump in a dead heat at 47 percent each. Another one percent backed Libertarian Jo Jorgensen. Only four percent were undecided.
The poll also showed close races for Georgia’s two Senate seats, although Republican David Perdue is running ahead of President Trump. Democrat Jon Ossoff trails Sen. Perdue by only two points while Kelly Loeffler narrowly leads a pack in the special election for her seat. Loeffler polls ahead of a crowded field with 24 percent while fellow Republican Doug Collins and Democrat Raphael Warnock both have 20 percent.
It is tempting to dismiss the poll as an outlier, but most recent polls have showed a close race. The outlier among recent polls is a WSB-TV survey that found Trump up by seven points.
In Iowa, the Des Moines Register found another 47-47 tie. This poll showed four percent supported another candidate with only three percent undecided.
As in Georgia, recent Iowa polls show a tight race. Trump has had only a 1-2-point advantage in the few polls conducted in the Hawkeye State since April.
With few voters undecided, there is scant opportunity for Donald Trump to pull ahead to a comfortable lead in these states that were assumed to be safe Republican territory. Even worse, Dick Morris’s maxim that undecided voters usually break for the challenger and against the incumbent may mean that Biden now has a slight structural advantage. In any case, the Trump campaign must expend resources to shore up states that should be safe.
And resources are getting thin. Politico reported that the Biden campaign out-raised Trump last month with a record-setting $365 million fundraising haul. The Biden campaign outspent Trump by two-to-one and still has a $466 million to $325 million advantage on cash reserves, a $141 million edge. The Trump campaign’s cash shortage has forced the cancellation of television ads in several battleground states, in most of which Trump is already trailing.
If the cash crunch persists, it will make it difficult for Team Trump to answer Biden’s final onslaught of ads. With early voting already underway, Donald Trump desperately needs a break in order to reverse Biden’s “Joe-mentum.” With a shortage of cash and bad poll results all over the map, that break won’t be easy to either find or exploit.
Originally published on The Resurgent
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