Former Vice President Joe Biden maintained a 5-point lead over President Donald Trump in Wisconsin, in the final Marquette University Law School poll before Election Day.
“As we’ve seen since May, this has been a very stable race,” said Charles Franklin, director of the MU Law School poll.
Among likely voters, the poll found 48% of respondents backed Biden while 43% supported Trump. Another 8% said they would not vote, were undecided or declined to say their preference and 2% backed Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen.
The poll was taken from Oct. 21 to Oct. 25 and included 749 likely voters. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
Franklin noted that since May, the poll has centered on a 5-point lead for Biden with a few dipping to 4 points and one at 6 points.
“That is much more stability than we saw in 2016,” Franklin said.
For respondents that declined to give their preference, the poll attempted to allocate their support based on their views on the candidates. If a respondent was favorable of one candidate and not the other, Franklin assigned their vote accordingly. If respondents had favorable or unfavorable views of both, the respondent was left unallocated.
The exercise did not change the vote margin with the vote split shifting to 50-45 in favor of Biden.
As for expectations of which candidate will win the presidential election, 80% of both candidates’ supporters expect their candidate to come out on top.
Overall, 46% of respondents expect Biden to win and 39% expect Trump to win. A majority of respondents, 52%, said one of the candidates would win by a little while 33% said a candidate would win by a lot and 15% said they don’t know who will win.
