Within the Margin

So here we are – WTM’s final call on the state of the presidential race. Let’s hit a few points:

• Remember that the gray-looking states on the map (FL, GA, NC) are Tilt Dem – the grayish hue makes them seem like toss-ups – but we don’t have toss-ups. Why would you want to hear us say “Gosh, we just don’t know?” Anyone can do that. You’re here because you want our best call, one way or the other. We’re not projecting a false sense of certainty – hence the gradations – but we’re trying to articulate our thinking.
  
• This shows Biden flipping quite a few states – AZ, FL, GA, ME-2, MI, NC, NE-2, PA, WI – and yet still represents a conservative take on the 2020 map. That’s because IA, OH and TX are polling on a knife’s edge, and we’d be completely unsurprised if they ended up voting narrowly for Biden. We’re not far from Team 413.

• This is not 2016. I know the MAGA crowd wants it to be, and I know countless traumatized Democrats discount the polls just as much as Trump supporters do. But much is different: we have far more state-level polling (which is where the errors were) in 2016, and from higher-quality pollsters who have incorporated proper weighting for education to catch more of the non-college White voters they were missing four years ago. Accordingly, polling was stronger in 2018. There were still some issues capturing those voters in the midterms in some states, as Sean Trende has observed, but less impactful than seen in 2016. As an incumbent, Trump no longer has the element of surprise. And as an incumbent, he is being graded poorly by voters on the biggest test of his administration – his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

• Don’t know who still needs to hear this, but a polling error in one party’s direction one year does not mean the polling error will be in the same direction the following election. It’s worth remembering that Obama benefited from a (normal) polling error in 2012.

• Where are we least-confident on this map? One state in each direction: Florida for Biden and Texas for Trump. After all, Florida burns Dems so often and so recently (the 2018 midterms). The Spanish-language disinformation campaigns wielded by right-wing groups in assorted Latin American countries via print media, WhatsApp, and so on is disconcerting, and makes me worry about any projections involving Florida’s Latino population. At the same time, the remarkable turnout in Texas creates remarkable possibilities. Biden’s going to improve on Clinton ’16 and possibly even Beto ’18; the question is how much. The stunning turnout in the state’s various large metropolitan areas opens up the possibilities up and down the ballot. And I want to give potential credit-in-advance where its due: of the two founders of this site, Matt’s leaning more optimistic for Biden – at 407 electoral votes, with pickups in Texas and Ohio. I’m just on the other side of the fence, but we have both been boosters of Biden’s chances in these states for months, before it was cool, frankly.

• Biden has experienced slight erosion relative to Clinton’s numbers among Black and Latino men (mainly in FL in the latter case) but has improved on her showing among White voters thanks to gains among college-educated suburbanites and a slight uptick in non-college Whites. In terms of maximum electoral impact, this is a winning tradeoff in 2020 – in part because the combination of how he’s getting there offers gains in both the Sun Belt and the Upper Midwest.

• Trump hasn’t gotten a confusion-inducing late-breaking development like the dual Comey letters of 2016. Getting a crowd to chant “Fire Fauci” is not the strongest closing message in the annals of presidential campaigns.

• We’re seeing a notable drop in third-party voting from 2016. Those voters are moving toward Biden more than Trump, but the additional impact of a reduction in third-party votes is an increase in the performance Trump needs. 46% of the popular vote might be enough to win a squeaker in the electoral college if third-party candidates are drawing 6%; it is much harder if they’re drawing 3%.

• Speaking of that 46%: it’s not at all clear Trump’s going to reach it. He’s sitting slightly below that in approval rating, which is usually a pretty good indicator of where an incumbent president ends up in vote share come re-election time (Clinton ’96, in a year with historically low turnout, is a notable exception – he was at 56% but only received 49% of the vote).

• By the way, in case there are still folks who need to hear this part, we have no evidence for the shy Trump voters some folks like to believe are all around us. Do I have a “shy” Trump-voting friend? I do. A bunch of the people reading this have the same friend. 😉 Do I think he is representative of a widespread phenomenon? No. I find they’re an ostentatious and decidedly-not shy group, in fact, but we have ways to measure this through polling methodology and, oh yeah, three years of elections where Trump rallied for various candidates and failed to get them over the finish line ahead – culminating in himself.