A new Marquette Law School poll finds former Vice President Joe Biden with a 46% to 43% lead over President Donald Trump in Wisconsin.
The poll matches the last poll from Marquette, which also had Biden up by 3 points in Wisconsin.
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One of the big questions when we look at national polls is whether or not they're an accurate representation of what is going on at the state level. One of the easiest ways to check is to compare state poll results to the past presidential vote in a given state. I did so for all telephone polls that called cell phones since the beginning of April.
When we average out these state polls, they suggest that Biden's running about 6 points ahead of Hillary Clinton's final margin.
In other words, the state level polls suggest that Biden has a national lead of around 8 points.
That's actually a little greater than the 6.6 points Biden has in the high quality national polling average taken during the same period.
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In the competitive states (where most of the state polling has been conducted), there has been an average swing of 6 points toward Biden compared to Clinton's 2016 result. The same is true in the non-competitive states.
At least from this state level data, it does not seem that either candidate is running up the score disproportionately in areas that were already friendly to him.
Biden has posted leads of greater than 5 points in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania. He is ahead in more than enough states to capture 270 electoral votes, if the election were held today.
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The polls underestimated Trump by 1 point (RealClearPolitics) or 2 points (FiveThirtyEight) in the aggregate of the states we currently have polling from. Applying that 2016 bias to our current data, Biden would have a 6- to 7-point lead nationally.
Concentrating on just the competitive states, the polls undersold Trump by 2 points (RealClearPolitics) or 3 points (FiveThirtyEight). If the polls in the competitive states were off by as much as they were at the end in 2016, Biden would still be ahead in states like Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
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CNN