For months, activists and Democratic party officials have been telling Joe Biden supporters that the only answer to the question “can we trust the polls?” is to go out and vote for Biden, and then get others to do the same.
“The polls are a mirage,” one organizer told the Guardian last month.
For partisans on either side of the presidential election, “go vote” remains the only sound advice. Tens of millions of people have acted on that advice and cast their ballots early in record numbers. Others are preparing to vote in person on Tuesday.
After the dust has settled on the election, there will be plenty of time to analyze whether the state-level polling delivered a better picture of the race this year than it did in 2016, political organizers say.
But one thing is certain: the polls at the end of the 2020 presidential race are telling a very different story from the polls at the end of the 2016 race, and it’s a rosier picture for Biden than it was for Clinton.
An unchanging polling graphic has emerged in this presidential race: two lines, a blue one above and a red one below, running in parallel, separated by 8 points or so, for the entire year.
Those lines represent the national polling averages over time of a head-to-head match-up between Biden and Donald Trump, and they have never intersected.
In the last presidential election, between Trump and Hillary Clinton, the polling averages intersected every couple of months, weaving their way towards an endpoint that depicted Clinton ahead by three points. She won the popular vote by two points.
The averages this time have Biden up by 7.5 points (Real Clear Politics), 9 points (New York Times/Upshot) and 9 points (FiveThirtyEight) – depicting a lead that is two or three times larger than that depicted for Clinton.
The White House is not won through a popular vote, of course. But opening up a large national lead is impossible without opening up state-level leads. And the state-level polls in 2020 also depict larger leads for Biden in key battlegrounds than they did for Clinton – with some important caveats.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
