Trump improves to 11-point deficit in new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads President Trump by 11 percentage points, 53 percent to 42 percent, in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News national poll of registered voters released late Wednesday. That's an improvement for Trump from the last WSJ/NBC poll earlier this month, which found him behind by 14 points, but it's larger than the 8-point lead Biden had in September.

Biden's 11-point lead is a little higher than his polling average — 10.2 points at FiveThirtyEight and 9.2 points at RealClearPolitics — but it points to a steep climb for Trump three weeks before Election Day. "The president may have recovered from COVID-19, but there is no experimental cocktail that can cure his standing with voters," said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt, who conducted the survey with GOP pollster Bill McInturff. Still, he said, "there are signs that the race could still tighten."

For instance, Trump's job approval rating, 44 percent, is higher than his vote share of 42 percent. And voters give Republicans a 13-point lead on handling the economy, the top issue in the race. But Democrats are up 17 points on handling the coronavirus and 18 points on health care, and voters said they planned to vote for congressional Democrats over Republicans by 8 points. An impressive 50 percent of voters say their families are better off than they were four years ago, but 58 percent said the U.S. is worse off and 60 percent said the country is headed in the right direction.

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NBC News reminds readers that Trump was down 11 points to Democrat Hillary Clinton in the WSJ/NBC News poll in October 2016, "but what's different from four years ago is just how stable Biden's national lead has been over the past year, including among key voting subgroups like women, voters of color, seniors and independents."

The poll was conducted by Hart Research Associates (D) and Public Opinion Strategies (R) Oct. 9-12 among 1,000 registered voters contacted by landline and cellphone. Its margin or error is ± 3.1 percentage points.