Former Vice President Joe Biden holds a 4-point lead over President Trump in a new Marquette University Law School poll of Wisconsin voters.
The poll released on Wednesday found Biden garnering 47 percent support among likely voters, compared with 43 percent for Trump, a difference that falls just within the poll’s margin of error.
Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen got 4 percent support, and another 7 percent of respondents said they would vote for none of those candidates, didn’t know how they would vote or declined to say.
The results show a slight winnowing in Biden’s margin from early August, when he held a 49 percent-44 percent lead in the state.
The poll was conducted in the aftermath of the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, in Kenosha, Wis,. by a white officer, fueling intense unrest in the city over systemic racism and police brutality. Blake survived the shooting but is partially paralyzed.
Many of the protests have remained peaceful, though there have been instances of looting and clashes with counter-protesters.
Tensions reached a boiling point after three protesters where shot, two of them fatally. A 17-year-old from Illinois has been charged in the shootings; social media posts showed he had posted a number of messages backing police.
There have been questions about whether the violence in Wisconsin would hurt Biden. Trump has seized on a law-and-order message while criticizing Biden, arguing cities would be out of control if he were president. Biden has responded by noting that the violence is taking place on Trump’s watch, and that the president is responsible for it.
Forty-seven percent of registered voters approved of the protests, while 48 percent said they disapprove, virtually the same results as from early August before the city’s demonstrations.
The survey was conducted from Aug. 30-Sept. 3, which covers the time when Trump visited Kenosha to meet with law enforcement and oversee damage from the protests. He did not meet with Blake’s family.
Biden also visited Wisconsin during that time frame.
The visits do not appear to have had a significant impact of registered voters’ views of how Trump has handled the protest, with 36 percent of those surveyed approving and 54 percent disapproving. That marks a slight uptick from August, when 32 percent approved and 58 percent disapproved.
Those results are sharply split along partisan lines, with 87 percent of Republicans polled approving of Trump’s handling of the protests after his visit, compared with just 4 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of independents.
Trump has used the demonstrations across the nation to ramp up his recent “law and order” message, suggesting the violence seen in some of the protests would only escalate if Biden is elected this November. Still, polls have shown the former vice president leading on the question of who voters trust to keep them safe.
Wisconsin is anticipated to be one of the most hard-fought-over swing states this cycle after Trump won there by just over 22,000 votes in 2016. Democrats have looked to take back ground in the state, scheduling their national convention in Milwaukee before transforming it into a digital format due to the coronavirus pandemic. Biden also visited Kenosha on Sept. 3, the final day of polling.
The Marquette University Law School poll surveyed 802 registered voters and 688 likely voters and has margins of error of 4 percent and 4.3 percent for the samples, respectively.