ActiVote Poll – October 17th, 2020

ActiVote conducted a national, presidential election poll among 3223 registered voters over the past 4 weeks. The result is weighted to represent the national electorate on characteristics such as region, gender, age, party affiliation, ethnicity, education, income, and likelihood to vote.

By nature of our poll there are no undecideds among our survey responses (so all categories sum to 100%) and we only focus on the head-to-head competition between the Democratic candidate (former Vice President Joe Biden) and the Republican candidate (current President Donald Trump) as the Libertarian candidate (Jo Jorgensen) and the Green candidate (Howie Hawkins) are nationally polling in the (low) single digits.

In the live poll in our app, all four candidates are included, but for our weekly poll analysis we only include those candidates who poll at 15% or more (the threshold set for participation in the Presidential debates by the Commission on Presidential Debates).

For information on how we conducted this poll, and on our current estimate of an approximate 5% liberal bias in our results, please see our answers to the CNN Transparency questionnaire for polling standards

Overall, former Vice President Biden leads President Trump by 10 points:

We find that 1 in 6 Republicans and 1 in 10 Democrats intend to vote for the other party’s candidate. Independents lean almost 2:1 Biden. Among 3rd party registrants (e.g. Libertarians, Greens) Biden and Trump are in a dead heat.

We found a gender gap of 6%, with more women preferring Biden. Still, Biden leads among both men and women.

Biden leads by almost 40 points among the youngest voters and about 25 points among those aged 30-49. The 50-64 age group is a near tie, while Trump leads by 12 points among the elderly (65+).

The racial divide is enormous, where the vast majority of all minorities support Biden, while Trump leads by 4 points among White voters.

Our educational findings are that, Biden and Trump are evenly matched among those with highschool or less, and with at least a Bachelor’s degree.. Among all those with some college, Biden has a 20% margin.

We see that Biden leads in all income categories with only small variantions in the level of support per category.

Trump leads by 20 points in the dark red states (AL, AR, ID, KS, LA, ND, NE, OK, SC, SD, WV, WY) and 6 points in the light red states (AK, KY, IN, MS, MT, TN and UT) worth a total of 116 electoral votes. Biden leads by 14 points in the light blue states (CO, DE, IL, ME, NM, OR, RI and VA) and by 30 points in the deep blue states (CA, CT, DC, HI, MA, MD, NJ, NY, VT and WA) worth a total of 213 electoral votes. In the swing states (AZ, FL, GA, IA, MI, MN, MO, NC, NH, NV, OH, PA, TX and WI) which are the remaining 209 electoral votes, Biden is 4 points up on average.