WASHINGTON — It’s no surprise that President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are neck-and-neck in Wisconsin.
“It's really close. It's a jump ball. That's what I got,” Ken Goldstein, the senior vice president for survey research and institutional policy at the Association of American Universities, said with a laugh.
Polls by the Marquette Law School consistently show a dead heat in Wisconsin.
But Goldstein, a polling expert, warns against how some other polls are portraying young voters. He is critical of polls that group 18-39 year olds together, arguing it’s too wide of a range to represent one viewpoint. Goldstein also warns the attention surrounding young people protesting Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza makes them appear as a larger part of the electorate. The Association of American Universities texted 18-29 year olds to get their own data.
“We think that's the best way to get a representative group of young people,” he said. “We show Biden winning by nine percentage points.”
With the election likely running through Wisconsin, Goldstein joined Jeff Mayers, the president of the political newsgathering site WisPolitics.com, to discuss how influential the Badger State will be.
“What are the demographics that make it a mirror to the rest of the country?” Mayers asked Goldstein during the discussion.
“It's not that Wisconsin looks like America, right? And that, wow, the demographics of America are exactly the demographics of Wisconsin,” Goldstein said. “That's not why it's special. It's special because it's close. That’s it.”
Another close race? The one for Wisconsin’s Senate seat. Incumbent Democrat Tammy Baldwin is facing a challenge from Republican businessman Eric Hovde. A recent Marquette poll showed that Baldwin only leads Hovde by 5 percentage points, 52 to 47, among registered voters. That didn’t surprise Goldstein.
“I don't see a world where anyone's winning Wisconsin by double digits,” he told Spectrum News.
Goldstein added that if either Biden or Trump do poorly in their debates, that could affect their chances of clinching the presidency. And, he said the third-party candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. hurts Trump and helps Biden, since people who want to cast an anti-Biden vote can direct it to him instead of Trump.