Poll: Biden pulls slightly ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania

Former President Donald Trump has enjoyed strong poll numbers for quite some time, both in terms of the Republican primary race as well as the general election, but President Joe Biden received a bit of positive news in terms of where things currently stand in the state of Pennsylvania, as The Hill reports.

A new Quinnipiac survey revealed that Biden took 49% support of registered voters in the Keystone State to Trump's 46% in a hypothetical head-to-head contest between the two.

The race in the traditional battleground state, according to the polling outfit, remains too close to call, but the result is surely a welcome glimmer of hope to a Biden campaign many believe to be floundering of late.

The outcome of the most recent iteration of the Quinnipiac poll represents the first time in the cycle in which Biden came out ahead of Trump, a fact which the president's supporters assuredly hope is a sign of things to come for the octogenarian commander in chief.

It is worth noting, however, that Biden's approval rating in Pennsylvania remains underwater, as the New York Post explains.

A paltry 40% of respondents in the Quinnipiac survey expressed their approval of the president's job performance, with 58% noting their disapproval.

Hardly any respondents – just 1% – were neutral on the job Biden has done to date.

Trump has a mixed record when it comes to his Pennsylvania performance in presidential elections, having taken the state in his battle with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, but losing in his 2020 contest with Biden.

Biden, for his part, has regularly given special attention to the state, delivering major speeches at locations within the Commonwealth, a place he touts as a second home, given his Scranton birthplace and his wife's roots in Philadelphia.

The calculus for the two presumed presidential nominees does not change a great deal when independent and other candidates entered the equation, according to Quinnipiac.

When independent hopefuls Robert Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West were thrown into the polling mix along with Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Biden still took 41% voter support, and Trump garnered 39%.

Kennedy, for his part, received 11% support from Pennsylvania voters, Stein took 4%, and West collected 2%.

The “too close to call” status assigned by Quinnipiac to a Trump-Biden matchup appears to mirror polling numbers published elsewhere, with the Real Clear Politics average for the period of Dec. 10 through Jan. 9 showing the former president upby a single point, with a host of other surveys yielding similar outcomes.

As Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy aptly observed, with its perennial status as a crucial battleground state, “Pennsylvania, so crucial and so close, again takes center stage as the swing state with the electoral heft to decide the election,” and it will therefore be the subject of much attention in the months to come.