President Trump and Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden are in a statistical tie in the key battleground state of North Carolina, according to a USA Today-Suffolk University poll released on Thursday.
The poll of 500 likely voters, conducted in the Tar Heel State between September 11 and September 14, showed Biden with a three point lead over Trump, 46 percent to 43 percent, which is within the poll’s 4.4 percent margin of error. Libertarian presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen received five percent support.
Curiously, the demographic questions for poll respondents included one that specifically asked whether their gender was male, female, or “non-binary,” that is “transgender, gender variant, or non-conforming.”
Forty-seven percent of poll respondents were men, 52.6 percent were women, and 0.4 percent, or two out of 500, said they were “non-binary (transgender, gender variant, or non-conforming).”
This may be one of the first times a polling firm has included “non-binary” as a gender option for poll respondents to select when describing themselves.
Forty-six percent of men in this poll of likely North Carolina voters support Trump, while 41 percent support Biden. Fifty percent of women support Biden, while 40 percent support Trump. An analysis of the crosstabs—which do not separately list the “non-binary” poll respondents as a row as they do with male and female respondents, indicates that the two non-binary poll respondents split their vote, with one (50 percent) supporting Biden and one (50 percent) supporting Trump.
Trump won North Carolina’s 15 electoral college votes in the 2016 presidential election by 3.8 points, defeating Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton by a margin of 50.7 percent to 46.9 percent.
The RealClearPolitics average of polls currently shows that Biden leads Trump in North Carolina by less than one percent.
Interestingly, 46 percent of poll respondents said they believe it is most likely that Trump will be elected president on election day 2020, while 44 percent said they believe it is most likely Biden will be elected president.
A poll released earlier this month by East Carolina University showed Trump with a two point lead over Biden, 49 percent to 47 percent.
Notably, just eight percent of Black voters who were surveyed in the USA Today-Suffolk poll of North Carolina likely voters said they intend to vote for Trump, significantly lower than the 13 percent who indicated their support for Trump over Biden in the East Carolina University poll released earlier this month.
Twenty-one percent of poll respondents said that the most important issue that the next president will address is jobs and the economy. Twenty percent said the most important issue is coronavirus, and 13 percent said the most important issue is racism.
Other key findings of the USA Today-Suffolk poll of North Carolina voters released Thursday include:
- By the narrow margin of 43 percent to 42 percent, poll respondents believe Donald Trump is more likely to win the planned presidential debates than Joe Biden is.
- 96 percent of respondents say they would not consider voting twice if they thought they could get away with it, while only 4 percent say they would vote twice.
- 60 percent of respondents believe the country is on the wrong track, while 27 percent believe the country is headed in the right direction.
- 52 percent of respondents say they are better off than they were four years ago, while 28 percent say they are worse off.
- 39 percent of respondents say the will vote in person on election day, 38 percent say they will vote in person before election day, and 20 percent say they will vote by mail or absentee ballot.
Thirty-eight percent of poll respondents were Democrat, 35 percent were Republican, 19 percent were unaffiliated, and five percent were libertarian.
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