Why The 2020 Presidential Election Is Not 2016

[Quixote1818]

August 8, 2020 7:01 AM ET
Domenico Montanaro

Democrats are haunted by the ghosts of 2016.

Hillary Clinton led in many polls over Donald Trump throughout that election cycle, and while the national polls were pretty dead-on when it came to the popular vote, some key battleground state polls got it wrong.

So who can blame Democrats when they don't believe surveys showing Biden with a significant lead nationally and in key states? The latest NPR Battleground Map released this week, for example, shows Trump slipping and Biden expanding his advantage in the key states. Democrats are favored to retain control of the House, and Republicans are worried about losing the Senate.

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But there are plenty of reasons why 2020 is not 2016:

1. Trump appears to have a ceiling of 46%: More concerning for the Trump campaign than a slippage in the polls is the very real possibility that he hasn't gotten higher against Biden than the 46% of the popular vote he got in 2016.

Trump's 45.6% average of the polls at the end of February was his peak against Biden over the last 10 months. What's more, in hundreds of surveys, Trump has only reached even 47% in a few.

2. The third-party vote share is likely to be lower: Roughly 6% of voters in 2016 voted third-party, the highest percentage since 1996. That helped Trump win the Electoral College. But the percentage of people voting third-party in 2020 this fall is likely to be lower for multiple reasons, including:

More: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/08/900338253/why-the-2020-presidential-election-is-not-2016

[obamanut2012]

1. k&r -- thanks for posting!

[genxlib]

2. I think this misses the biggest difference for me

In 2016, Clinton was winning polls but she rarely cracked 50%. That represented a pretty big slice of undeclared voters.

In 2020, Biden is winning polls by regularly being above 50%. Big difference if it holds.

Having said that, national polls are useless since it is only predicting the popular vote. As we saw, that can go upside down. Swing state polls are far more important in predicting the Electoral College.

[beachbumbob]

3. we are building off of 2018 and ever growing anger

any one who mentions 2016 is being less than stellar in opinion as 2016 and 2020 are NOT remotely comparable. Outside of russian misinformation efforts. We have NO "berne brother" movement fracture, we have a nominee with no clinton baggage and we have trump's years of negligence and his own words to use use

any time I see this commentary I think of russian bots at work

[RhodeIslandOne]

4. This election is a blowout.

It's the cheating, endorsed fully by the media, that will fuck it up.