That so far from Democratic voters ….
Making the case for Biden’s electability goes beyond simply highlighting favorable polls. Much of the campaign’s programming is geared toward building the case that the former vice president is the best candidate to take on the GOP incumbent Democrats want to kick out of office so badly that many a’re willing to put their ideological preferences aside.
“Clearly, his experience, his decency, his connection to the middle class, the fact that he can get a lot done, he has results, he can work across party lines — all of those go into the fact that he can beat Trump,” said John Anzalone, Biden’s pollster.
The 2020 election is still 440 days away, and general-election match-up polls this far out aren’t very predictive. At this point in 2015, Hillary Clinton had a more-than-10-point lead over Trump in the RealClearPolitics average.
And while primary polling becomes more predictive as the first votes of the nominating process draw closer, general-election polls still lack predictive power until later on. An analysis by FiveThirtyEight of polls conducted a year before Election Day — so three or four months from now in this cycle — shows they were off by roughly 10 percentage points. A headline about it, published two months ago, read, “Should We Take These Early General Election Polls Seriously? $#!% No!”
But Biden is wringing them for all they’re worth, and it’s easy to see why: His structural advantages over Trump are greater than his opponents, at least for now.
Biden leads Trump by 7 points overall in the POLITICO/Morning Consult survey and also posts larger leads than the other Democratic candidates among independents (by 8 points), self-identified moderates (27 points) and voters in the Midwest (5 points)….