US Election Watch: Stable race still stable

If all you had been following were the polls, you would assume this to have been the most uneventful election year in history.

Photograph: Joe Biden campaigns in Des Moines, Iowa. By Phil Roeder on Flickr, January 2020.

Welcome back to Bournbrook’s regular series on the state of the US presidential race, your impartial guide to the campaign and what you can expect as election date draws near. 

Last week, two days after the first presidential debate, Donald Trump announced that he had tested positive for COVID-19. Since then, the president was briefly hospitalised at Walter Reed medical center near Washington D.C, before returning to the White House on Tuesday. 

Other members of the administration have since tested positive, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and Senior Adviser Stephen Miller. Trump, for his part, claims to be doing very well (at least well enough to appear in daily Twitter videos). 

As the White House battled its own internal coronavirus outbreak, Americans watched the one and only vice presidential debate, between Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris. The event was far more civil than the Trump/Biden clash last week. A variety of topics came up while many questions were left unanswered, as both candidates frequently ignored the moderator and pivoted to talking points. 

I could spend a little longer delving into it but, honestly, who cares? There is no serious evidence to suggest that vice presidential debates have any meaningful impact on the ‘horse race’. Neither of the candidates dealt a knockout blow and every scientific poll I’ve seen shows Harris won. Let’s move on. 

The state of the race 

While the vice presidential debate likely won’t change anything, we have received a lot of polling since the Trump/Biden clash last week (as well as the president’s coronavirus diagnosis). In short, what may have been Trump’s best chance to mount a late comeback has resulted in an extended Biden lead. As of this morning, the Democrat is ahead by 10.1% in the FiveThirtyEight national polling average. 

Twenty four days until election day, this is a colossal lead for the former vice president. The last time a candidate had a larger advantage at this point in the race was Bill Clinton in 1996 (who subsequently trounced his Republican opponent). It is Biden’s biggest lead of the whole campaign and, while Trump can still win, no previous presidential candidate has climbed out of a hole this deep. The only potential comparison would be Harry Truman’s surprise win over Thomas Dewey in 1948. Truman, however, was catching up to his challenger in the final weeks and months, while Trump is going backwards. 

Yet, as we all know, the election will be decided in individual states, not by the national popular vote. To that effect, the table below shows how the polling has changed in the thirteen battleground states since last Saturday. 

Data: FiveThirtyEight

As you can see, Donald Trump has lost ground almost everywhere (in Minnesota, where the president is down nine points, the polling average remains unchanged). Granted, Biden’s gains in battleground states have not been as impressive as his national ones, but we’re really splitting hairs at this point. The Democrat was already ahead in more than enough states to reach 270 electoral votes. Now, his cushion against a potential polling error is even larger. Last week, I noted that Biden would still win if the polls underestimate Trump by 5% in every state. As of today, that number is 7%.  

Since the new year, America has witnessed a brief military confrontation with Iran, a presidential impeachment, a pandemic which has killed over 213,000 of its people, a historic recession and months of protests, riots and civil unrest. However, if all you had been following were the polls, you would assume this to have been the most uneventful election year in history. 

To give you an idea of just how stable the 2020 race has been, I took the RealClearPolitics polling average every week from April 1st to October 7th for the past four presidential elections and plotted it into the graphs below. 

Here is another way to think about it. So far this year, the difference between Biden’s highest and lowest margin over Trump in the national polls is only 5.4%. That is compared to 12.5% for Clinton in 2016, 7.6% for Obama in 2012 and 10.8% for Obama in 2008. 

In 2016, Donald Trump was able to win the electoral college with 46% of the popular vote. Even if he is able to replicate that level of support this year (he is currently at 42%), it will not be enough. With a historically low third-party vote and very few undecideds, Biden is polling significantly better than Clinton at this late stage. Unlike Clinton, he is also breaching 50% in enough states to secure 270 electoral votes. I’ve said it before but I’ll repeat it here - Trump’s base mobilisation strategy is not good enough. 

Usually, when a president is elected by a hair’s breadth, the next four years are an opportunity to expand their coalition. Twenty years ago, another Republican narrowly claimed the White House following a loss in the popular vote. While certainly a divisive figure, George W. Bush ultimately won re-election by a larger electoral college margin than before and got three million more votes than his opponent. No doubt, Bush was effective at mobilising his base, but he also won a higher share of the women and ethnic minority vote than any Republican since. Trump, meanwhile, has done little to appeal to those outside his tent. He claims to represent the ‘silent majority’, but all evidence points to him being the leader of a rather loud minority.  

On the flip side, it is far too late for the president to embark upon a grand persuasion mission. Save a major unforeseen event, his only hope of re-election rests on a record-breaking polling error and abnormally high rejection rates for (predominantly Democratic) mail-in ballots. 

Finally, as we look towards election day, we must remember that we are currently deep into election month, with at least 8.7 million people having already voted. In two battleground states, Minnesota and Wisoncsin, the reported early and absentee vote is now over 20% of 2016 turnout. In Florida, a must-win state of President Trump, well over a million have cast their ballots. This is all happening in a national environment which, if the polls are even remotely correct, is devastating for Trump, making an upset less likely by the day.