Yahoo News/YouGov poll: The tide turns against Trump as Biden surges to his largest-ever lead among likely voters

With only two weeks left until Election Day, Joe Biden’s lead over President Trump has widened to 11 percentage points — Biden’s biggest margin among likely voters in any Yahoo News/YouGov poll to date.

The survey, which was conducted from Oct. 16 to 18, shows that a majority of likely voters (51 percent) now say they are voting for the Democratic nominee, while just 40 percent say they are voting for Trump. Biden’s lead, which is identical among registered voters, has grown by 3 points since last week’s Yahoo News/YouGov poll.

The president has struggled to rebound over the past three weeks from a widely panned first debate performance and a COVID-19 outbreak that sent him to the hospital and sickened others in and around the White House. Yet the main reason Trump appears to have fallen even further behind Biden in recent days is that coronavirus cases are peaking just as the campaign is coming to a close. On Friday, new daily cases cleared 70,000 nationwide for the first time since July; hospitalizations are increasing in 39 states, and are at or near their all-time peak in 16 states.

Trump vented his frustration with the coronavirus on a campaign call Monday, saying, “People are tired of COVID. I have these huge rallies. People are saying, ‘Whatever. Just leave us alone.’ They’re tired of it. People are tired of hearing [Anthony] Fauci and all these idiots.”

Tired or not, Americans have growing concerns about Trump’s leadership amid a resurgent pandemic — and those concerns appear to be dimming his hopes of a comeback. Nearly two-thirds of registered voters (63 percent) now say the “number of cases is increasing,” up sharply from 57 percent last week and 48 percent the week before that. A full 60 percent think the pandemic will get worse this fall; only 15 percent think it will get better.

As a result, Biden’s existing advantage over Trump on the question of who would do a better job handling COVID-19 — the top issue of 2020 — has nearly tripled from 7 points two weeks ago (45 percent to 38 percent) to 19 points today (52 percent to 33 percent). Sixty-three percent say Trump has not been wearing a mask or social distancing appropriately; 60 percent say he has not followed the advice of medical experts closely enough; and 59 percent say he has underestimated the risks of COVID-19 — something that just 8 percent of registered voters say about Biden.

In dealing with the pandemic, a majority (54 percent) say the former vice president has behaved appropriately.

Key demographic groups are moving away from Trump in response. Right now, the president is losing independents, 39 percent to 37 percent; he won them by 4 points in 2016. He is losing suburban voters by 14 points (50 percent to 36 percent); he also won them by 4 points in 2016. Trump’s current leads among white voters (7 points) and seniors (3 points) are less than half of what they were four years ago (20 points and 7 points, respectively). Nine percent of 2016 Trump voters now say they are voting for Biden; just 4 percent of 2016 Hillary Clinton voters say they are voting for Trump.

Meanwhile, the president is running out of time to resurrect his reelection bid. Just 5 percent of likely voters remain undecided, and a mere 3 percent say there is still “a chance I will change my mind” in the next two weeks. Even worse for Trump is that his supporters appear far more open to flipping than Biden’s, with just 1 percent of Biden voters saying they could still change their minds versus 7 percent of Trump voters.

With early voting well underway across the country, the percentage of ballots already cast is growing rapidly — and Biden is banking far more votes than Trump. Last week, 17 percent of likely voters said they had already voted; this week, that percentage has more than doubled, to 38 percent. Given the inherent lag of mail balloting and recent nature of most of these votes — 75 percent of early voters say they voted during the past week — such numbers suggest that the early vote tally could soon hit an unprecedented 60 million.