Biden’s margins IN THE polls are much larger than Hillary Clintons were against Donald Trump up to this point….
With Joe Biden claiming almost a double-digit lead in national polls, one question still seems to loom over the race: Can we trust the polls after 2016?
It’s a good question. But for now, it’s not as important as you might guess. If the election were held today, Mr. Biden would win the presidency, even if the polls were exactly as wrong as they were four years ago.
The reason is simple: His lead is far wider than Hillary Clinton’s was in the final polls, and large enough to withstand another 2016 polling meltdown.
If polls were off by as much as they were in 2016, Joe Biden would still lead most battleground states.
| TOTALS BASED ON CURRENT POLLS* | IF POLLS ARE AS OFF AS THEY WERE IN 2016 | |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral coll. | 390 | 310 |
| CURRENT POLLS | IF POLLS ARE AS OFF AS THEY WERE IN 2016 | |
|---|---|---|
| Arizona | Biden +3 | Biden <1 |
| Florida | Biden +6 | Biden +3 |
| Michigan | Biden +10 | Biden +5 |
| North Carolina | Biden +3 | Trump +1 |
| Pennsylvania | Biden +7 | Biden +2 |
| Wisconsin | Biden +8 | Biden <1 |
| U.S. avg. | Biden +9 | Biden +7 |
This is not to say that President Trump can’t win. There are still nearly four months to go until the election — more than enough time for the race and the polls to change. The race changed on several occasions over the final months in 2016. And this race has already changed significantly in the last four months. According to FiveThirtyEight, three months ago Mr. Biden held a lead of only about four points….
…
Mr. Biden also enjoys a far wider lead in the battleground states likeliest to decide the presidency. His 13-point lead in a Monmouth University poll of Pennsylvania published on Wednesday, for instance, puts him in a much stronger position than Mrs. Clinton, who had a four-point lead in the last Monmouth poll of Pennsylvania taken just before the election.
Of course, the polls could be even further off this time than four years ago. But there are also many reasons to think they could be better this time around….
This gets a little esoteric for me.
This looks more like Cohn needed to write a column so he wrote this.
Indeed he even hints at this by the sentence:
“Of course the polls could be even further off this time than they were four years ago.”
Well yeah they could .So really what’s the purpose of this type speculation?
Trump’s 50% Problem
First Read says President Trump has a 50% problem:
50% of all registered voters in our poll “strongly” disapprove of the president.
50% say there is no chance at all they will vote for him.
50% say they’re “very uncomfortable” about his candidacy.
51% are backing Joe Biden in the horserace, versus 40% for Trump.
“One of the old maxims of American politics used to be that an incumbent (for any office) needs to be at 50% to be safe for re-election — otherwise there’s a majority of voters who exist that don’t support him or her. But Trump has a different problem at hand: He’s got 50% (or more) of the national electorate saying they strongly oppose him.”
Dave Wasserman
@Redistrict
Biden is ahead by 9.1% in today’s
@FiveThirtyEight
average. Bottom line: Trump would need to close that gap by at least 5 points to be highly competitive in the race for the Electoral College.
David Frum
@davidfrum
Trump’s core political problem is that a very large majority of Americans believe that he is a terrible president whose incompetent leadership is to blame for tens of thousands of preventable deaths and Depression-level unemployment.
THIS IS what we see in margins….
Nate Silver Retweeted
Geoffrey Skelley
@geoffreyvs
I looked at our historical polling data from 2016 as of same point 4 years ago & compared Clinton to Biden in our current averages.
National:
Biden +9.1
Clinton +2.1
EVs based on where candidate led by >6.0 or safe for a party (not incl. NE-2/ME-2):
Biden 307
Clinton 198
…
Aaron Astor
@AstorAaron
·
Replying to
@geoffreyvs
Comey held the press conference about HRC’s emails on July 5. Her poll numbers started to drop about a week later and didn’t recover until well into the Dem convention at the very end of July.
But the boats!
The boats in Florida! Those beautiful boats. Thousands of them with TRUMP signs! The boats! He has to be winning. There are no Biden boats!
Yeah that bit makes Peggy Noonans comments about all the Romney yard signs she saw in Virginia look like exhaustive polling data.
Will Mexico pay for the boats?
It’s possible Russia already did.
His fans online think the freakin Goya beans are going to win him reelection!
If I was back at a different point in my life, I would enjoy taunting them severely. Instead, I am trying to stay out of internet cesspools. I get attacked enough here.