For almost four years now, Donald Trump’s Presidency has subjected American democracy—its institutions, its professed values, and its citizenry—to an unprecedented stress test. Now comes the most fraught examination of all: Can the country peacefully usher out of office an authoritarian-minded leader who has a large and increasingly fanatical base of support, but one which has always been a minority? With one day left in the 2020 campaign, there are reasons for optimism, including a huge surge in early voting, but also some grounds for concern.
Let’s start with the latest polling. On Monday morning, the RealClearPolitics poll average showed Joe Biden leading Trump nationally by 6.7 percentage points. The FiveThirtyEight poll average, which is calculated somewhat differently, showed Biden ahead by 8.4 points. The battleground-state polls were closer and, in some places, they displayed evidence of late movement in Trump’s direction. Still, FiveThirtyEight’s state poll averages showed Biden retaining significant leads in the three places that decided the 2016 election in Trump’s favor: Michigan, by 8.1 points; Pennsylvania, by 5.1 points; and Wisconsin, by 8.2 points. Biden was also running slightly ahead of Trump in four Sun Belt states that the President carried in 2016: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina.
On the basis of the polls, a Biden victory is by far the most likely result. If he wins any of the closely contested Sun Belt states, he will be in an extremely strong position in the Electoral College. Alternatively, he could lose all of those states and still come out on top if he carries Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump, by contrast, has to hold all of the closely contested red states and also pick up another state where he is further back, with Pennsylvania being the obvious target. That’s a very big ask. Given the closeness of the contests in some battleground states, however, the range of conceivable results is still disconcertingly wide. It ranges from a historic blue wave, which would give the Democrats control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress, to a replay of 2016.
Before you panic, it is worth noting a number of factors that greatly reduce the probability of history repeating itself. For Trump to win this time, he would need a much bigger polling error than the one four years ago. Back then, the final RealClearPolitics poll average showed Hillary Clinton leading Trump by 3.2 percentage points nationwide, and her actual margin in the popular vote was 2.1 points. The big error in 2016 came in the state polling. Going into the election, the RealClearPolitics poll average showed Clinton leading by 3.6 points in Michigan, 2.1 points in Pennsylvania, and 6.5 points in Wisconsin. Trump carried all three states, of course, albeit by very narrow margins.
Biden’s current lead in the polls isn’t just bigger than Clinton’s was going into the 2016 election; it is more stable. If you look at a chart of the national head-to-head matchup going back to March, when Biden effectively wrapped up the Democratic nomination, the numbers haven’t changed much. After Trump’s disastrous performance in the first televised debate, at the end of September, the gap in Biden’s favor widened by a few points. During the past couple weeks, the gap has narrowed a bit, bringing it back roughly to where it was before the first debate. Still, the main impression is of a stable race.
A second challenge facing the Trump campaign is that there aren’t nearly as many undecided voters as there were in 2016. After that election, when a panel of pollsters went back and looked at what went wrong with their surveys, they concluded that one of the biggest factors was a late and largely undetected swing to Trump among undecided voters. “About 13 percent of voters in Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania decided on their presidential vote choice in the final week, according to the best available data,” a 2017 report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research said. “These voters broke for Trump by near 30 points in Wisconsin and by 17 points in Florida and Pennsylvania.”
This year, an overwhelming majority of Americans have already made up their minds about the election. Recent polls indicate that the number of undecided voters is less than half of what it was in 2016. A clutch of last-minute polls released, on Sunday, by the polling team from the New York Times and Siena College showed that in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Florida just five to six per cent of respondents were undecided or refused to express a preference. In Wisconsin, the figure was just four per cent. Other polling organizations have generated similar figures. If they are accurate, then there isn’t a lot of room for late swings.
Another big difference from four years ago is that by Monday, according to figures tallied by the U.S. Elections Project, more than ninety-six million Americans had already voted, either in person or by mail. In some battleground states, the early-voting figures were stunning. About 2.3 million people had voted early in Arizona, compared with a final total of 2.6 million ballots cast in 2016. In Florida, about 8.9 million people had voted early, compared with a 2016 total vote of 9.4 million. In North Carolina, 4.5 million had voted early, compared with a total vote of 4.7 million four years ago. Numbers like these are testimony to the eagerness of the American people to exercise their democratic right to vote, and much of this enthusiasm is surely due to the identity of the man in the White House. After the surge in early voting, many analysts are predicting an unprecedented over-all turnout. High turnout helped the Democrats in the 2018 midterms, and it could well do so again this year. With the polls indicating that most of the people who have already voted are Democrats, Trump will need a huge turnout of his supporters on Tuesday, including those that have registered recently. He will also need to rally more support among two demographic groups with which he appears to have lost a good deal of support: seniors and white women without college degrees. The shift away from Trump among older voters—the group most vulnerable to COVID-19—is particularly striking, and it has persisted into the latest polls.
In the new Times/Siena College survey of Florida, Biden is leading Trump, forty-eight per cent to forty-six per cent, among voters aged sixty-five and older. This lead of two points is too small to be statistically significant, but it contrasts starkly with the findings of the network exit poll in 2016, which indicated that Trump defeated Clinton by seventeen points among Florida seniors. The same trend is visible in other states and other polls. In Pennsylvania in 2016, Trump beat Clinton by ten points among voters aged sixty-five and older, according to the network exit polls. In a new Monmouth University survey, which was released on Monday, he is trailing Biden by a point among Pennsylvania seniors.
How can we sum up this polling data? The final Fox News national poll, which was released on Saturday, showed Biden leading Trump by eight points among likely voters. “Biden has the advantage among key groups, especially seniors, suburbanites, and independents,” the Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who worked with a Democratic colleague on the poll, told the network. “Trump needs a few more points out of these groups to win re-election. But the main impediment is the stubborn stability of the race; it hasn’t changed much all year despite pandemics, economic collapses, and massive social unrest.”
The Trump campaign insists that things are going the President’s way, of course. “This is déjà vu all over again,” the Trump pollster John McLaughlin said, on the “Cats Roundtable” radio program over the weekend. Pointing to a narrowing in the polls in Florida and other states, McLaughlin went on, “Four years ago, when they told us we couldn’t win, we proved them . . . wrong.” On Saturday, many Trump supporters seized on a new poll from Iowa, another battleground state, which showed Trump moving into a seven-point lead over Biden, after being tied with him in the same poll a month ago. The survey was carried out for the Des Moines Register by the respected pollster Ann Selzer, and it found that Trump had regained some ground among Independents and women. “The president is holding demographic groups that he won in Iowa four years ago,” Selzer told the Register, “and that would give someone a certain level of comfort with their standing.”
