North Carolina Apperas to Be 2020 Battleground State

Newly released polling data shows North Carolina is likely to be a close match-up in the 2020 presidential election, while Governor Roy Cooper looks favorable to win re-election to a second term.

Public Policy Polling released it’s first polling results related to the 2020 election cycle last week. They spoke to 750 North Carolina-based registered voters between the days of January 4 and the 7 over the phone and through an online survey.

And based on what they found, Cooper might just breathe a little easier heading into his re-election campaign. The responses from voters on how Cooper is handling his job were favorable with 44 percent approve of the job he is doing and 35 percent disapproving. At the same time in Pat McCrory’s governorship, North Carolinians disapproved of the job he was doing by four percentage points in a similar survey.

Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling, spoke to Aaron Keck last Thursday about these latest polling results.

“Cooper has held up with his popularity much better over the first couple of years of his governorship than his two immediate predecessors have,” he said.

Also in Cooper’s favor, Jensen said, were the poor numbers put up by the current governor’s likely Republican opponents. Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest all but declared his candidacy for the race last August when he declared that a Forest Administration would be able to fix the I-77 tolls project. But the results here show Forest has bad name recognition among voters, and trails behind Cooper by 12 points in a hypothetical match-up.

The polling also asked about five other hypothetical Republican challengers in 2020. Pat McCrory proved the closet match, with only five points between him and Cooper.

The number surrounding the presidential election in 2020 are a lot narrower, Jensen said.

“Really, the way that those shook out was, the higher the name recognition for the Democrats, the better they did against Trump,” Jensen said. “Trump got 44 to 46 percent no matter who he tested against him. But the Democrats got varying levels based on how well known they were.”

For President Trump, 46 percent approved of the job he was doing, while 50 percent disapproved in these polls. Against hypothetical Democratic challengers Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, Trump scores around five and three percentage points below them, respectively. He tied likely contenders Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris and led by several points over Beto O’Rouke and Cory Booker.

A key group in the elections might turn out to be those who did not pick one way or the other in these polls. Jensen said that crucial group of undecided voters still have a lot of time to swing one way or the other.

“They are the kind of voters who just dislike everyone, and its just going to be a question who they are going to dislike more when we get to 22 months from now. The tendency is for those voters who dislike everyone is to generally vote for the party that is out of power. So that would probably be good news for Democrats, but there’s also plenty of time in the next 22 months for Democrats to antagonize these voters even more than Republicans do.”

First Look at 2020 Election Polling In New North Carolina Survey

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