Biden Leads in Florida, Tied in Texas, Fox Says: Campaign Update

(Bloomberg) -- Fox News polls released Thursday put Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden ahead of President Donald Trump by 9 percentage points in Florida and by 1 point in Texas.

In Texas, 45% of registered voters said they would vote for Biden if the election were held today, while 44% would back Trump. In Florida, Biden had 49% while Trump had 40%. Both polls were conducted June 20-23 and had a margin of error of 3 points.

Fox polls also showed Trump trailing Biden, 47% to 45%, in Georgia and North Carolina.

Neither Texas nor Georgia have been deemed battleground states in this election, though Florida and North Carolina are considered in play, along with Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Trump Turns His Supporters Against Vote-by-Mail (5:25 p.m.)

President Donald Trump’s frequent attacks on vote-by-mail are hitting home with large numbers of his supporters.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released Wednesday showed that 88% of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s supporters strongly or somewhat support vote-by-mail, while 72% of Trump supporters strongly or somewhat oppose it.

That mirrors other polls, which have shown a growing partisan divide on mail-in voting as states have sought to expand it and more voters have requested absentee ballots in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump has repeatedly claimed, without proof, that vote-by-mail is rife with fraud that harms Republicans. Its use is expected to surge in the November election, but Trump’s attacks could undermine confidence in the results, causing uncertainty about the outcome that could last days or even weeks.

Until this year, polls had not shown any difference between Republicans and Democrats on vote-by-mail, which has been embraced by both parties as part of get-out-the-vote efforts in different states over the years.

Rice Would Push National Service as VP (4:16 p.m.)

Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice said Thursday that the U.S. should require mandatory civilian service for all young adults — and that she would advocate for such a policy if selected as the running mate of Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

“I wish we could have mandatory national civilian service in this country so that every kid between 18 and 21 could spend 12 months, whether it’s broadband, building infrastructure, or rehabilitating inner-city schools and libraries,” she said. Doing so, she added, would help unite people of different racial, geographic and economic backgrounds.

Biden proposed universal mandatory service — either in the military, Peace Corps or domestic civilian service — as recently as 2007. But he abandoned that position when he signed on as President Barack Obama’s running mate. Now, Biden is thought to be vetting Rice as one of several women who could be his own vice president.

Rice was asked by radio host Michael Smerconish at the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service if she would support universal service if “hypothetically speaking ... let’s say that from a very close chair, you had the ear of a commander-in-chief” in a future administration. “The short answer is yes,” she said, grinning.

“In an era where we can’t even get people to wear masks to save their lives or even their grandparents, I understand what a challenge it is to make it compulsory,” Rice said. “Rarely do we make extraordinary leaps in one bound.” -- Gregory Korte

Trump Team Outlines Strategy to ‘Define’ Biden (2:50 p.m.)

President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign outlined a strategy to “define” his opponent Joe Biden by negatively comparing the two men’s records ahead of the November election even as polls show the Democratic nominee leading in several crucial states across the country.

“When you ask a question about Joe Biden, people don’t know who he is,” Tim Murtaugh, Trump 2020 communications director, said in a conference call with reporters Thursday. “As the nation comes out of the coronavirus crisis and we begin to reopen and the economy begins to rebound as we’re already seeing, we will again be defining Joe Biden.”

The campaign scheduled the call ahead of Biden’s visit to Pennsylvania on Thursday. Asked if the campaign’s attacks on Biden have made an impact the same way those against Hillary Clinton did, Murtaugh said that this has been “an unusual campaign” because the Democratic nominee was decided in the middle of the coronavirus crisis.

“We are very confident on running on the president’s record and comparing that to Joe Biden’s disastrous record,” Murtaugh said. “Over the course of the next four-plus months Americans will get a full reading of what the differences really are.”

Murtaugh discounted the methodology of recent polls, many of which show Biden leading nationally and in battleground states by a large margin, adding that the campaign’s own polls show the president ahead in 17 states key to the November election. -- Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou

Carly Fiorina, Trump Rival in 2016, Backs Biden (12:00 p.m.)

Republican Carly Fiorina says she will vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in November.

Fiorina, who was chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard Co. from 1999 to 2005, ran for the Republican nomination in 2016 against Trump. and other candidates She said she has struggled about whether to go public with her decision in an interview with The Atlantic magazine published Thursday.

“I’ve been very clear that I can’t support Donald Trump,” she said. “And elections are binary choices.”

Fiorina added that Biden was a “person of humility and empathy and character” and that “character counts.”

She’s not the first presidential and vice presidential candidate to later endorse the other party’s nominee. Former Democratic-turned-independent Senator Joe Lieberman backed his longtime friend John McCain in 2008. -- Ryan Teague Beckwith

Coming Up:

The Democratic National Convention is scheduled for the week beginning Aug. 17 in Milwaukee, while the Republicans are slated to meet a week later with events in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.