Joe Biden tops President Donald Trump in Arizona voters matchup poll
May 7, 2019, 7:09 AM | Updated: 9:42 am
(AP Photos)
(AP Photos)
PHOENIX – For the first time since the 1990s, a Democrat has a chance to win Arizona in the presidential election, and a poll of likely Arizona voters showed that person could be Joe Biden.
The former vice president topped President Donald Trump, 49 percent to 44 percent, in an OH Predictive Insights poll of 600 people.
Trump beat all the other top Democratic contenders – six of them – in head-to-head matchups released Tuesday. Twenty Democrats have announced bids for the 2020 race.
“This poll shows Joe Biden could turn Arizona into a true battleground state in 2020,” OH Predictive’s research chief Mike Noble said in a statement.
In February, a similar poll from the Phoenix-based firm had Biden and Trump tied with 46 percent apiece. Biden wasn’t officially running then. He announced his bid to for his party’s nomination less than two weeks ago.
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“If Democrats put electability above all else, Biden could run away with the nomination and the White House,” Noble said.
Undecideds were at 7 percent.
“Joe Biden is the comfortable one, the one everyone knows,” political consultant Stan Barnes of Phoenix told KTAR News 92.3 FM.
“This poll affirms that if it were simply a political science experiment, Democrats would put Joe Biden up as the nominee, and we’d have a real race,” Barnes said.
The last time a Democrat running for president captured Arizona was 1996, when Bill Clinton topped Sen. Bob Dole.
Trump led Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont 46 percent to 37 percent, and Sen. Kamala Harris of California, 48 percent to 39 percent.
(OH Predictive Insights)
The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office said there were about 3.77 million active voters in the state, and more Democrats than Republicans.
The quarterly voter registration update counted 1,170,825 active Democratic voters to 1,312,638 Republicans.
Active votership fell from 3.78 million, the report said.
The poll also showed Trump had lost 18 percent of Republicans voters to Biden and was behind in Maricopa County by 10 points.
The phone poll was conducted May 1-2 and combined live calls and automated systems and had a margin of error of 4 percent.
KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Jeremy Foster contributed to this report.
