From The New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is Daily.

Today,

this fall's presidential race is likely to be decided by a handful of battleground states,

one by President Trump in 2016.

Nate Cohen, on what a major new poll from The New York Times,

found about how voters in those states view the president and his Democratic rival.

It's Thursday, June 25th.

Nate, the last time we talked about polling in the presidential race,

it was still the Democratic primary, it was back in November.

And the polling that you all did showed that no matter which Democrat Donald Trump would face,

he was doing okay.

Yeah, the polls showed that Donald Trump was pretty competitive.

He was in a close race against all of his major Democratic rivals.

He wasn't always ahead and he was losing to Joe Biden, for instance.

But he wasn't a pretty good and highly competitive spot.

Even at a moment where he was facing imminent prospect of impeachment in the House of Representatives.

And so after all of that, for him still to be so close, sure seemed like he was in a pretty decent position, all considered.

So what was your thinking going into this next big poll that you all just finished?

Well, I did not think that Donald Trump would be doing quite as well as he had done in October.

I mean, there have been a lot of polls over the last couple of months indicating that Joe Biden has had a gradually building lead,

both nationwide and in the battleground states.

But given that we had such good results for the president in the past,

...