Why Joe Biden Remains a Heavy Favorite to Win
Recent polling shows Donald Trump will have to complete one of the greatest turnarounds in American history to win
With 57 days left until the election, Donald Trump would need to completely shift a stable race to win a second term. Although there has been some consternation about the race tightening, Joe Biden remains a massive favorite to win the election because Trump has several problems.
First, Trump’s ratings are catastrophic. His personal favorability rating, in the RealClearPolitics average, is negative 13.3. In YouGov’s polling of if likely voters approve of how Trump handles himself, he’s -24 points. Tons of political scientists view incumbent races as a referendum on the president, which is also backed up by YouGov’s polling where 75% of those likely voters say their opinion of what Trump has/will do as president explains their vote. Only 24% list Joe Biden’s presidency as why they’re voting for their preferred candidate.
Second, Trump’s ratings haven’t moved much. While he received a three-week rally around the flag effect in March for the coronavirus, his approval rating has been between 40 and 44 percent each day in their average in 2019 and 2020. 97% of voters say they’re either strongly or probably going to vote for the candidate they support. For as eventful as 2020 has been, Biden led by a few points before coronavirus, and he’s had a bigger lead since the rally around the flag effect dissipated. He’s never trailed in key swing states after April.
Third, voter’s views on Trump’s handling of the virus look baked. 60% of voters told YouGov they thought Trump handled the virus poorly, which matches the percent that said they don’t believe Trump will give them accurate information on the virus. 58% believe he could be doing more to handle the virus. Perhaps most catastrophically, even if a vaccine gets announced, 65% think it will probably be rushed without enough testing (I will note that personally I will get a vaccine the moments it’s approved; I’ve tried to sign up for the human challenge trials, but the public is far more cautious). This matters because even if cases start declining in a few weeks—something I’m not going to predict with how unpredictable the virus has been—Trump’s numbers are so awful that he needs to convince a sizable chunk of voters that he’s responsible for the improvement. Given they don’t trust him, and they blame him now, he’s facing quite a headwind to get credit for anything good.
Fourth, the protests have not adversely impacted Biden. A few months back, I listed the protests as one area that could be a vulnerability for Biden. One theory is that even if Trump’s president, if the protests turned violent in some spots, voters might have “law and order” as a more salient issue and would prefer Republicans on that issue. But that’s not borne out in polling. 79% of likely voters said they thought it was “not too likely” or “not at all likely” that violent protests would occur in their neighborhood. Only 31% of Trump voters listed policing/protests as their major concern about a Biden presidency, while 59% listed the economy.
Perhaps the best example that the protests haven’t hurt Biden is Wisconsin. Kenosha is in Wisconsin, and Trump even visited the area to try and tie Biden to the unrest in the city. But Biden leads by at least five points in the four polls of the state since August 21. He hits at least 49 percent in all those polls; Hillary Clinton did that in just one of the final 16 polls of Wisconsin (those polls also rarely weighed by education, while 2020 pollsters do). Biden leads by eight points in Rasmussen’s most recent poll, and that firm is consistently biased toward the GOP—as 538 rates it as one of the most pro-Republican polling outlets. If Trump can’t win over folks in Wisconsin—a state he won in 2016 and where the situation is different than in suburban Phoenix, Detroit or Pittsburgh—why is he going to have a different result in those spots?
Biden also has held onto his broad electoral college paths. Trump has an electoral college edge compared to the popular vote; he’ll probably lose the popular vote by more than he loses the state that provides the 270th electoral vote. But Biden has several paths to the White House. If he wins Arizona—a state I covered over the weekend where Biden has led all spring and summer—and the Clinton 2016 states, he wins the presidency with: (1) Florida, or (2) with two Rust Belt states or (3) with North Carolina and Michigan or Pennsylvania:
Without Arizona, he can also win the electoral college by just winning back two Rust Belt states and North Carolina, or he could just win the three Rust Belt states (where Biden leads in the polling averages) that Trump won by fewer than 100,000 combined votes in 2016:
Trump could still win the election. I’d give him about a 15% chance to do so, and 15% events happen all the time. But the reality of his polling situation and the condition of the country makes him overwhelmingly likely to lose. Maybe things change for him. They haven’t all year, and if they don’t, he’ll be out of the White House next year.
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