This piece by CNN’s Harry Enten takes a look at the presidential campaign polls and offers some hope for the fall. I would never say that anyone should be complacent. After all, they cheat. But we can feel a little bit better for this weekend anyway:
Poll of the week: A new national Fox News poll finds former Vice President Joe Biden with a 48% to 40% lead over President Donald Trump.
The average of all polls taken at least partially this week have Biden up by a 48% to 41% margin.What’s the point: Almost any time I explain that Biden’s leading Trump, someone will inevitably bring up “but what about 2016.” That’s why this week marks an important milestone for the Biden campaign.
It’s one of the first times during the election year that Biden was clearly running ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 pace in the matchup against Trump.
Four years ago, Trump closed the national gap quickly with Clinton as he was vanquishing Republican rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich from the presidential race. Clinton’s average lead shrank from 10 points during the first half of April to 6 points in the second half in April to 4 points in the first half in May to a mere 1 point in polls completed four years ago between May 16-May 23.
In terms of individual high quality polls, you needn’t look further than Fox News. Clinton trailed Trump by 3 points in a Fox News poll out four years ago between May 16-May 23. Now, Biden’s up 8 points in that same poll.
Indeed, Clinton was also down in a high quality live telephone ABC News/Washington Post poll four years ago completed between May 16-May 23.Biden notably hasn’t trailed in a single live interview poll this entire year.
Although Clinton would regain some of her advantage in June 2016, the fact that the race became so close at this point four years ago was an indication that the electorate was somewhat unsettled. It showed that under the right circumstances, Clinton could lose nationally, or, at the very least, that Trump could come close enough nationally to win in the electoral college.
Biden’s lead, of course, is the steadiest of all time. His lead has never fallen to just a point or anywhere close. It’s been consistently at or right around 6 points, as it was this week. If you were to create a 95% confidence interval around the individual 2016 and 2020 polls, the 2016 race was about 1.5 times as volatile up to this point.
But it’s not just the margin that is important to examine. Look at the vote percentages.The reason Biden’s lead is so wide compared to Clinton’s is that he’s running a little more than 5 points ahead of where Clinton was in terms of vote percentage. Biden is at slightly greater than 48%, while Clinton was a little less than 43%.
Even when Clinton’s lead widened in June, she never got to 48% in the polls. She had to pick up a lot more late-deciding voters for her lead to feel secure than Biden will likely need to.
But get a load of this:
Interestingly, Trump’s actually pulling about the same percentage of the vote in the polls as he was in late May 2016. Without rounding, he’s running only about 0.4 points worse.
I will never, ever understand it. I can only assume that tens of millions of Americans are just as arrogant, narcissistic and dumb as Trump himself and will never admit they were wrong.
Enten goes on to examine the third party vote in 2016 which doesn’t really exists this time and points out that a significant third party vote usually reflects a greater uncertainty and allows the major party candidates to pick up some voters as time goes on and their candidacies flame out.
In other words, Trump had more wiggle room four years ago to pick up ground. And, in fact, Trump won on the strength of his support among voters who decided in the last month.
He points out that more voters are already saying they’re willing to vote for Biden than they ever were for Clinton. (A sad comment, but oh well.) If Biden can keep the voters he has over the rest of the campaign it’s looking somewhat hopeful.
Trump, of course, will blame his loss, if he suffers one, on the pandemic, mail in vote cheating, the Chinese , whatever. But this will belie his lies:
Even when the economy was rolling the guy couldn’t get above 45% approval rating. He barely peaked at 46% when the whole world got hit by a crisis which is almost always a moment a majority rallies around the leader.
He may still win. As I said, they cheat. But he has never had enough support to win legitimately.