Last week I canvassed polling in the battleground states and found Democratic nominee Joe Biden looking strong in his campaign to rid our nation of the Trump cancer. Well, a week has passed since. Where do things stand now?
This is the base map. The winner needs 270 electoral votes.
Maine and Nebraska both apportion electoral votes statewide and by congressional district, and each has a battleground vote at stake. Hillary Clinton won Maine handily in 2016, yet Donald Trump won its rural 2nd congressional district. Trump won Nebraska handily, yet Clinton came within two points of picking up the Omaha-based 2nd.
While it’s been assumed that Trump has the edge in that Maine rural district, a Quinnipiac poll yesterday found Biden leading Trump by a big 53-44 margin. Polling earlier this year in Nebraska had Biden handily winning that district as well. As such, I will award both those votes to Biden in the baseline below.
Also, polling has shown Alaska and Montana as competitive. Both are hard-to-poll states with minimal polling, so I’m leaving them in the Trump column for now. But I suspect they’ll be closer than anyone expected when ballots are counted. So let’s see where everything stands, including a column with the weekly change.
STATE |
ELECTORAL
VOTES |
Economist
POLL AGGREGATE
|
Weekly
Change
|
TOTAL |
Baseline |
- |
- |
|
234-163 |
MICHIGAN |
16 |
Biden +7.8 |
+0.2 |
250-163 |
WISCONSIN |
10 |
Biden +7 |
-0.2 |
260.163 |
PENNSYLVANIA |
20 |
Biden +5.8 |
+0.2 |
280-163 |
ARIZONA |
11 |
Biden +3.4 |
-0.6 |
291-163 |
FLORIDA |
29 |
Biden +3.4 |
+0.2 |
320-163 |
NORTH CAROLINA |
15 |
Biden +1.4 |
- |
335-163 |
GEORGIA |
16 |
Trump +0.8 |
-0.2 |
335-179 |
IOWA |
6 |
Trump +1.8 |
-0.4 |
335-185 |
OHIO |
18 |
Trump +2 |
-0.2 |
335-203 |
If these numbers reflected actual election results, Trump would barely exceed 200 electoral votes. Hillary Clinton got 232 electoral votes, and Trump never stopped bragging about his massive victory. Getting him under 200 EVs would be a great cherry on top, wouldn’t it?
And if we want to dream, the Texas polling composite has Trump leading by just 1.4 points, 50.7 to 49.3. I probably should add it to the chart above, I’m just having trouble believing it’s really that competitive. But I may have to surrender to the data when I do next week’s polling roundup.
Still, 270 is the core focus, and Pennsylvania remains the tipping-point state, with Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina all providing backup just in case. (Though I will never depend on Florida for anything. Let it be a bonus. But if we need it, the state will break our heart.) Still, Biden looks so good precisely because of his big leads in the Big Three—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It’s hard seeing how Trump overcomes a 6-point or larger deficit in all three of those states.
Let’s not forget that state numbers don’t move independent of national trends. And on that front:
Biden has an 8-point lead. It was 8.2 last week. So—steady as always. In fact, just eyeballing the graph above, nothing has changed since late May, when Trump finally announced a national emergency because of the pandemic. You can see how this electoral collapse mirrored the fall in his own job approval numbers:
In The Economist polling aggregate, Biden went from +6 to +8.
In the Civiqs daily tracker of Trump’s job approvals, Trump went from a net approval of -11 to -13.
Two points.
200,000 people dead, and counting, and two measly points.
But you can see how strongly correlated Trump’s job approvals are to his vote total. So while national polls don’t tell us who will win the race, because we don’t have a real democracy in this country, it does give us a solid guidepost upon which to measure the state of the race.
Right now, Joe Biden is winning. As long as Trump’s job approvals don’t improve, he won’t make up lost ground in the battleground states he is losing. One week just went by, and nothing changed. That’s a good thing, because with just 47 days left until the election, and with people already voting in key states like Florida and North Carolina, Trump is running out of time to improve his chances.