Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
As of Sunday evening, Former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump by an average of 7.2% nationally. Biden is leading by 3.3% in battleground states. RealClearPolitics
Also as of Sunday evening, The FiveThirtyEight forecast gives Biden an 89% chance of winning the electoral college. FiveThirtyEight
Explore ways Trump or Biden could win the election yourself. FiveThirtyEight
The right is optimistic about Trump’s chances.
“President Trump has a clear path to 270 electoral votes and he’s busy earning each and every one of them… I believe the president will carry Texas, Indiana and all the other reliably red states for his first 163 electoral votes. In 2016, his road to victory ran through Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Iowa. In 2020, this path remains intact, with the addition of Georgia and Arizona. With repeat victories in these states, plus the electoral votes in Maine and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional Districts, that brings President Trump’s tally to 260 electoral votes — just 10 votes shy of the magic number of 270…
“Pennsylvania has 20 electoral votes, Michigan has 16 and Wisconsin has 10. In this scenario, with the president sitting at 260 electoral votes, he needs to win just one of these three states to prevail. The president is also on offense and actively campaigning in Minnesota, Nevada and New Hampshire — states he narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016. To put a fine point on it, he only lost these three states by approximately 74,000 votes combined.”
David N. Bossie, Fox News
“[Florida] went for Trump in ’16 by a mere 1.2 points. He’s been trailing in the polls there, but Trump’s popularity with Hispanic voters has been surging, so look for Florida to stay — barely — red. Minnesota, meanwhile, went for Clinton in 2016 by less than two points, and a long summer of urban violence in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police may lead to a 2020 law-and-order win here for Trump. The same is true of neighboring Wisconsin, where violence also flared in Kenosha…
“Early voting generally favors the Democrats, but in several states Trump needs to win, including Florida and North Carolina, Republicans are closing the gap. The good news for Trump is that if he can win Nevada and hold on to Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia, he can afford to lose Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota and still cross the finish line with at least 275 electoral votes. In the weird year of 2020, that’s as good as a landslide.”
Michael Walsh, New York Post
In Florida, “Democrats need to run up the score in Miami-Dade to have any hope of winning the state’s 29 Electoral College votes, and so far the Biden campaign’s turnout isn’t even keeping up with Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 effort…
“Polling and analytics only take campaigns so far. They have to ask voters to participate, and keep following up, with effective community-based efforts. The RNC and the Trump campaign has used that model throughout the campaign, tracking and targeting voters who might need extra encouragement to get to the polls and (hopefully) calculating their messages in the local context of each community…
“It’s far too late to launch an effective GOTV [Get-out-the-vote] effort now, no matter how much money the Biden campaign pours into the effort. It takes months to build the kind of contacts and networks that will effectively motivate low-propensity voters to the polls. It takes weeks just to identify the people who can even make contact with those voters… Team Biden bet that an air war would win in a pandemic. So far, it looks like they’re going to lose, at least in Florida — and the fact that Biden showed up in Minnesota today hints that it’s failing even in safer states.”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
“The Commerce Department released the U.S. gross domestic product number for the third quarter, showing growth rate of around 33 percent… The economy is turning around, playing to Trump’s strength. The president has made significant outreach to minorities, and a relative handful of Black voters switching from Democrat to Republican could help him secure states like Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina. Not to mention that Trump — unlike Biden — is actually campaigning for the job…
“Pollsters insist their surveys have been adjusted from 2016 to include more demographics that support Trump — though they may harbor new flaws. They are still unlikely to capture the vast enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden voters and fail to pick up the ‘shy Trump voters,’ — people afraid to admit they back Trump — who may be shyer than ever….
“The shy voter phenomenon could prove even more pronounced in 2020 than in 2016. You could at least explain not voting for Clinton. She was unlikable to so many. Though inspiring fewer strong feelings, Biden is, at least, not as easy to despise. What’s more, Trump has been vilified for the past four years, giving voters less of an excuse to admit they’re still voting for him. This could be particularly true for Black and Latino voters.”
Keith Koffler, NBC News
Some caution that “the final national polls in 2016 were pretty accurate. There were some big misses in state polling (Wisconsin most of all) but national polls on average had Clinton winning by around three points when in reality she won by two. Trump can’t win the electoral college if Biden wins the national popular vote this time by, say, seven… it’ll take a much bigger polling screw-up this time for Trump to win than it took in 2016.”
Allahpundit, Hot Air
The left is optimistic about Biden’s chances.
The left is optimistic about Biden’s chances.
“Biden leads in all the states Hillary Clinton won in 2016 by more than 5 points. He is also ahead in a bunch of contests that Trump won in 2016… even if Biden were to win just the states where he led by 5 points or more, he'd still get over the 270 electoral vote mark… More interesting is what happens if you look at the specific state errors that occurred in 2016. The errors were biggest in the Great Lake (Rust Belt) states. They tended to be considerably smaller in the Sun Belt. As The New York Times' Nate Cohn points out, Biden would get more than 300 electoral votes if the 2016 errors repeated themselves exactly in 2020…
“[Finally] Biden's ahead by 9 to 10 points nationally. Clinton was up by 3 to 4 points in the final polls of 2016 and took the popular vote by 2 points, a small error… Previous calculations indicate Trump probably can't win in the Electoral College if he loses by more than 4 to 5 points nationally… [In order to win, Trump would] need to benefit from a much bigger polling error than four years ago.”
Harry Enten, CNN
“In Pennsylvania, Clinton’s unfavorable rating was 56 percent, as measured by an October 2016 Quinnipiac survey. This month, the same pollster showed Biden at 43 percent. In Wisconsin, Clinton’s unfavorable rating stood at 52 percent in a Marquette survey. Marquette now shows Biden at 45 percent. In comparable surveys, Biden’s net favorable rating has beaten Clinton’s by 11 points in North Carolina, 13 in Wisconsin, 18 in Florida, 23 in Pennsylvania, and 27 in Georgia. Her average unfavorable rating across the five states was 56 percent. Biden’s is 45 percent. That’s the difference between winning and losing…
“In fact, these numbers understate the gap. The last voters to make up their minds are independents, and they’re way more open to Biden than they were to Clinton. Among independents, in same-pollster comparisons, Biden’s net favorable rating has exceeded Clinton’s by shocking margins: 30 points in Wisconsin, 32 in Georgia, 38 in North Carolina, 44 in Pennsylvania, and 45 in Florida.”
William Saletan, Slate
“General election voters still perceive Biden as relatively moderate, and historically, more moderate presidential candidates generally do better in general elections. They generate less opposition when it comes to voter turnout and are perceived as less extreme by swing voters — though that advantage is declining. In fact, Trump benefited from this dynamic in 2016, when he was perceived as more moderate than most Republican candidates…
“Additionally, Biden’s supposed lack of enthusiasm among small donors never really materialized. Despite struggling with online donations in the primary, Biden is now raising 1,000 times as much online per day as he was last year. He’s also outraising Trump, which suggests that maybe in fundraising, partisanship matters more than excitement around the nominee or even ideology. Likewise, voter turnout estimates remain very high… it is increasingly looking like Democractic primary voters might have been right about Biden’s electability argument.”
Matt Grossmann, FiveThirtyEight
“Trump’s relentless campaigning across the Rust Belt has masked the fact that many of his most powerful advisers—including Jared Kushner, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and his former top economic adviser Gary Cohn—are closely aligned with the free-trade ethos of Wall Street… The five hundred thousand pre-coronavirus manufacturing jobs that the Trump Administration is touting, [Robert E. Scott, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute] noted, is the same relatively small number that were created during the last three years of Obama’s term…
“Bernie Porn, the president of EPIC-MRA, one of Michigan’s oldest pollsters, told me that a week before the 2016 election ‘Clinton was leading among union members by only forty-six to thirty-eight per cent, with eight per cent for third-party candidates and thirteen per cent undecided—most of which went to Trump.’ In EPIC-MRA’s most recent poll, Biden is leading among union members, seventy-one to twenty-three per cent.”
Dan Kaufman, New Yorker
Regarding voter turnout, “Texans have already cast more ballots in the 2020 election than they did in 2016… the state’s urban and suburban counties have been the primary drivers of the turnout spike, with Harris County (home to Houston) mounting an especially impressive showing. Nearly 1.4 million people have already cast ballots in Harris, setting a new record for the county…
“In 2018, a 27-year-old Colombian American immigrant named Lina Hidalgo narrowly defeated an 11-year Republican incumbent to become Harris’s ‘county judge,’ its top elective position. In 2016, Harris spent roughly $4 million on administering its elections. Under Hidalgo’s leadership, the county pumped that budget up to $31 million: Enough money to triple the number of early voting sites in the county, and keep some locations open 24 hours during the final days of early voting… no matter how the final vote tally shakes out, the existing data already offers Democrats one vital lesson: Obscure local elections can have enormous consequences.”
Eric Levitz, New York Magazine
