Biden's Polling Lead Is Big -- And Steady
The race between President Trump and Joe Biden is verging on a landslide. That’s not a word we use lightly.
Over the past month, Biden’s lead over Trump has been both incredibly stable and unusually large. Amidst Trump’s unpopular handling of the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd, Biden’s lead has hovered within a tight band of 8.9 to 9.6 percentage points since mid-June, according to FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average.
This is a sizable enough lead that Trump’s reelection chances are in a precarious position. Take what CNN analyst and FiveThirtyEight alum Harry Enten found earlier this month when he looked back at presidential elections where an incumbent was running since 1940. He calculated, on average, a 7-point difference between the final national popular vote margin and the polls conducted four months out. That might sound like a lot of movement — and it is — but the problem for Trump is even if the polls swung toward him by 7 points, he would still trail Biden by about 2 to 3 points nationally. The median difference Enten found, 4.5 points, would leave Trump in even worse shape.
Of course, if the polls did swing 7 points in Trump’s favor, leaving him only 2 to 3 points behind Biden nationally, Trump could still win — after all, he won in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by about 2 points. But this isn’t an easy reelection path, particularly if Biden’s lead holds.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bidens-polling-lead-is-big-and-steady/
