A major blue state has slipped into toss-up territory as President Biden’s poll numbers continue to flounder, according to a major poll rater.
Virginia is now rated a toss-up by RealClearPolitics, which analyzes and averages the latest polling for the 2024 election.
Virginia has 13 electoral votes, which Democrats have snagged in both of the last two presidential elections. A presidential candidate needs 270 electoral votes to secure victory.
In 2020, Biden won Virginia by 10 points or nearly half a million votes. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the state by less, five points or about 200,000 votes.
Clinton’s popularity in Virginia may have been boosted by picking Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate.
However, Biden has slowly lost ground in Virginia this election cycle, according to polls from the last few months.
In a poll from late May, Biden and former President Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, were shown tied 42-42.
In another estimate, Biden leads Donald Trump by just 0.1%, according to an average of 17 polls.
Other states marked as toss-ups by the poll rater are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Overall, Trump is up over Biden by less than a point, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls.
As of late last month, the former president was leading in five of six swing states, although Biden has been shown with a small lead in several of those states since then, according to some polls.
In 2020, Trump lost a slew of these battleground states: Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
With the election just five months away, both Trump and Biden have ramped up their campaign strategies. Democrats have leaned into the abortion issue and Trump’s recent felony conviction, while Republicans have doubled down on their attacks on the economy under Biden, immigration, and the court cases against Trump.
Trump is battling several court cases, one of which kept him stuck in a Manhattan courtroom all day for weeks until late last month, when he was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels. Trump scheduled rallies and other campaign events in the evenings, on weekends, and on Wednesdays when the court was not usually in session.
Later this month, voters will see the president and former president go head-to-head in the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, which is scheduled for Thursday, June 27.
The first debate could jolt polling in favor of one candidate, at least briefly, as presidential debates have done in the past.
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