President Joe Biden has received negative polling news in a state the Democratic Party has not lost in 20 years.
The incumbent president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is set to face former president Donald Trump in November, having both received enough delegates in presidential primaries. Polls have so far shown that the results of the 2020 White House rematch will be tight, with the pair statistically tied or holding only marginal leads in a number of surveys.
However, according to polling by firm co/efficient, Biden and Trump are now tied in Virginia, a state which has not backed a Republican for president since George W. Bush in 2004.
According to their survey of 851 likely voters, 41 percent would vote for Biden while 41 percent would vote for Trump. A further 12 percent are undecided and seven percent would vote for a third-party candidate like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Its findings suggest that Biden is losing support in the state. In 2020, he won Virginia with 54.15 percent of the vote, and by a margin of 10.2 percent, which marked the best performance for a Democratic presidential candidate since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944.
However, polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight which ranks pollsters based on their historical track record and methodological transparency, has awarded co/efficient 1.1 stars out of three and has given it a transparency score of 3.2 out of 10, raising questions about the reliability of the poll.
