The Washington Post reports:

Before the coronavirus pandemic shut down Tampa’s hotels and put her out of work, Audrey Scaglione said she expected to vote for Donald Trump a second time. Now the contract food service worker finds herself struggling to decide.

“I’m just really unsure right now,” said Scaglione, who says she leans Republican but also previously voted for Barack Obama. “It is so hard to tell. I don’t think I can.”

She has not heard much from former vice president Joe Biden, the Democratic choice for president, and has few kind words for Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a close Trump ally, who has done little to improve a byzantine unemployment benefit system she spent months navigating.

And then there is the president himself. “If he would just stop tweeting,” she said, “I think everything would be a little bit better.”

Scaglione’s dilemma has become a burgeoning obsession for Republican strategists, who have watched a perilous fall in support for Trump’s reelection over the past few months. The shift has resulted in an advantage of five to six points in key Midwestern swing states that offered Biden only marginal leads at the start of the year.

At the core of the erosion is a dramatic abandonment of Trump by key demographic groups. The rebellion by college-educated women against the president in 2018, which gave Democrats control of the U.S. House via victories in the suburbs, has begun to register more deeply in recent months among non-college-educated and older women.

Trump’s weekend rally in Tulsa, which focused more on his personal grievances than on solutions to America’s pressing problems, reinforced the sentiments that political strategists say have driven women to desert him. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports:

Joseph R. Biden Jr. has taken a commanding lead over President Trump in the 2020 race, building a wide advantage among women and nonwhite voters and making deep inroads with some traditionally Republican-leaning groups that have shifted away from Mr. Trump following his ineffective response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new national poll of registered voters by The New York Times and Siena College.

Mr. Biden is currently ahead of Mr. Trump by 14 percentage points, garnering 50 percent of the vote compared with 36 percent for Mr. Trump. That is among the most dismal showings of Mr. Trump’s presidency, and a sign that he is the clear underdog right now in his fight for a second term.

Mr. Trump has been an unpopular president for virtually his entire time in office. He has made few efforts since his election in 2016 to broaden his support beyond the right-wing base that vaulted him into office with only 46 percent of the popular vote and a modest victory in the Electoral College.

But among a striking cross-section of voters, the distaste for Mr. Trump has deepened as his administration failed to stop a deadly disease that crippled the economy and then as he responded to a wave of racial-justice protests with angry bluster and militaristic threats. The dominant picture that emerges from the poll is of a country ready to reject a president whom a strong majority of voters regard as failing the greatest tests confronting his administration. [Continue reading…]