Biden continues to lead in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, polls indicate

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden continues to lead President Donald Trump in the battleground states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, according to CBS News Background Tracker polls released Sunday.

The polls show Biden leading Trump by 6 percentage points among likely voters in both states — 49 percent to 43 in Pennsylvania, 48 to 42 in Wisconsin. Trump won both of those states in 2016 by less than 1 percentage point, but polling in recent months has consistently put Biden ahead in both.

In both states, those polled said Biden would be better than the incumbent in handling the coronavirus pandemic, giving him a 10-point edge in Pennsylvania and a 15-point margin on the issue in Wisconsin.

Biden is expected to unveil his vice-presidential choice in the next few days. A majority of voters in both states, though, said the choice didn’t particularly matter to them — 62 percent in Pennsylvania said Biden’s selection was “not very important” or “not at all important,” as did 56 percent in Wisconsin.

Before Trump won those two states in 2016, no Republican presidential candidate had done so since the 1980s. That was also true of Michigan, and those three states, with their 46 combined Electoral College voters, were considered to be the ones that put Trump over the top.

The CBS News polls were conducted by YouGov from Aug. 4 to Aug. 7. , based on samples of 1,009 registered voters in Wisconsin and 1,225 in Pennsylvania. The margins of error for registered voters in both states were plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.