The WaPo data analytics gang looks at the latest polls in an attempt to tell us “Who is ahead in 2024 presidential polls right now?” Despite a rebounding economy, conviction on 34 felony counts, and general sleaziness, they assess that
Donald Trump is leading in 5 of the 7 battleground states that are most likely to determine the outcome of the election. The polls are particularly close in the first three battlegrounds below, meaning our average is within a normal-sized polling error of 3.5 points and either a Trump or President Biden victory is plausible. In the other four battlegrounds, the candidates’ polling leads are larger, but the race is still close.
Here’s a snapshot of where the states in question stand, compared to the 2020 results:
Assuming the polling is a real reflection of where the race stands, it’s noteworthy that, with the exception of Wisconsin, Trump is doing better in all seven states than he did in 2020.
Independently, Nate Silver launches his revised election forecasting model and tells us “The presidential election isn’t a toss-up.” The actual numbers and part of his analysis is behind a paywall and much of what he includes in the linked post amounts to throat-clearing—musings about the nature of modeling, assumptions, and the like. Still, he’s pretty confident:
There are a lot of other models out there, which show Trump with anything from a 50 percent chance (538’s new model) to a 71 percent chance (the Economist) of winning. I have disagreements with those models — how couldn’t I, given the amount of time I’ve spent on this particular problem? But I don’t think any of them are unreasonable. It’s possible — in fact, rather likely, since there are several of them — that one of those models will prove to be better calibrated than mine over the long run. Although I do think it’s noteworthy that — self-aggrandizing aside ahead! — the Silver Bulletin model is the only one that has actually reached anything resembling the long run, with a strong out-of-sample track record over 16 years now.
(For those who missed the news: Silver and much of his old team were let go by Disney a year or so ago as part of that company’s massive downsizing. Silver retains the proprietary model but Disney now owns the FiveThirtyEight brand.)
Moreover, he wants you to know,
One issue is that I’m not only a statistician/analyst/pundit/journalist/degenerate gambler or whatever-the-fuck you want to call me — but also an American citizen who cares about political outcomes for a combination of selfish and altruistic reasons. Now that I’m on my own — not tied to some corporate behemoth like The New York Times or Disney — I feel freer to be transparent about my preferences. Although I have plenty of disagreements with progressives these days, my political values haven’t changed that much. I don’t want Trump to win the election, and I’d never consider voting for him.
[…]
I think it’s important to be up front, because I’ve been rather lucky in one sense in my election forecasting career. I began making election forecasts in 2008, and in literally every presidential year since then, I haven’t really had to deal with a conflict between what I personally wanted to see happen and what my forecast said. This year, I do have that conflict. The candidate who I honest-to-God think has a better chance (Trump) isn’t the candidate I’d rather have win (Biden).
Wouldn’t it be suspicious if, in the first presidential cycle where the Democrat has consistently trailed in polls since 2004, I suddenly started telling you that you should trust vibes rather than polls? Or if I chucked out my heretofore well-performing model for a new one that had Biden favored — or at least had the election as a toss-up?
Which gets us back to why he thinks Trump is clearly leading the race for 270 Electoral votes, rather than it being a toss-up:
[T]he reasons that Trump would win have gradually become somewhat more compelling than the reasons for Biden. Emphasis on gradually and somewhat. Biden clearly could win in November. He won the same matchup four years ago. Not only would he be within a normal-sized polling error of Trump if the election were held today, but there are still four-and-a-half-months to go.
Still, the items on the “reasons to think Trump might win” checklist have proven to be more robust. There’s Biden’s age, which voters have extremely persistent concerns about. There’s the very high inflation of mid-2021 through mid-2023 — which has considerably abated, but still is reflected in much higher prices than when Biden took office. There’s the fact that the global mood is pessimistic and that incumbents have been getting crushed everywhere around the world. Plus, some of the factors I thought would be an advantage for Biden haven’t proven to be. There’s less of a fundraising gap than I expected, for instance, and I’m not sure that Biden has run the smarter tactical campaign.
What’s happening this year isn’t quite the “unthinkability bias” that [RealClearPolitics founder Sean] Trende wrote about eight years ago after Brexit. Trump was already president for four years, so it’s hardly unthinkable. And I don’t know many Democrats who deny that he could become president again; instead, most are very worried. But you’ll sometimes hear exasperated comments along the lines of how can Biden possibly be losing? — not as a way of questioning the polls so much as questioning the wisdom of the electorate. (Or the media.)
Well, here’s how. Biden has the lowest approval ratings of anyone running for re-election since either George H.W. Bush or Jimmy Carter, depending on how you squint at the numbers. The reasons he might lose are overdetermined. (I haven’t even mentioned things like immigration or the war in Gaza.) Would it really be surprising if he’s become an underdog, even if it’s against a candidate as flawed as Trump?
While I still believe—as I did in 2016 and 2020—that Trump will ultimately lose, it honestly requires motivated reasoning to think he’s currently behind. I find it bizarre that anyone but the most dedicated Republican partisan supports him given everything we’ve learned about him over the last eight-plus years. But the polls are the polls and they have been largely unchanged for more than a year now.
But maybe that’s changing?
The news isn’t all bad for Biden. We do have him trending upward relative to a month ago. Biden probably has been helped by Trump’s conviction on felony charges related to hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels — what sort of world are we living in that I can write a phrase like that about a presidential election?
Silver’s aggregates are slightly different from those used by WaPo but point in the same direction:
Alas . . .
But I don’t think the glass-half-full view is quite right:
- This is the most important complication: if Biden loses Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — and he trails badly in each — he’ll need to win all three of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and not just one of them. Even though these states are pretty heavily correlated, they aren’t perfectly correlated. Winning several different correlated bets is still hard. (Just ask the DraftKings how it makes so much money on same-game parlays.) And these states do have some differences with one another: Wisconsin is more rural, for instance, and Michigan has the largest Arab/Muslim/Palestinian population. In our simulations, Biden wins at least one of these states 54 percent of the time. But he wins all three of them in only 32 percent of simulations. This is the sort of precision that a model can provide that your intuition really can’t.
- Biden also has to hold on to states like New Hampshire and Virginia (and New Mexico and Minnesota and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District) in the Blue Wall-saves-the-day scenario, and that’s not quite a sure thing given Biden’s mediocre polling elsewhere in the Northeast. This is less of a concern for him, though — conditional on winning Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, Biden wins the Electoral College about 97 percent of the time in our simulations.
- In those Sunbelt swing states — meaning Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, where he won last time, and North Carolina, Florida and Texas, where he didn’t — Biden trails badly. Not so badly that he can’t win — the model gives him a 22 percent chance of eventually winning Arizona, for instance. But badly enough that he’s borderline out of the “normal range of polling error” scenarios and either needs a big polling error or for something fundamental to change about the race — even though it’s been exceptionally steady so far. Either of those things are possible — just not the outcome you’d bet on at even money. For now, he has nothing in the way of a reliable backup plan if any of the Rust Belt trio falls to Trump. It’s just not good for Biden that he trails by mid-single digits in high-quality poll after high-quality poll of states like Georgia and Nevada.
And there’s also a credible glass-half-empty view of Biden’s Rust Belt polling. In 2020, Michigan was 2.7 points to the right of the national average, Pennsylvania was 3.3 points to the right, and Wisconsin was 3.8 points to the right. So if you buy that Biden is down by a point or something nationally — or even if you think that that the race is tied or Biden is a half-point ahead — you’d expect him to be narrowly but meaningfully behind in these Rust Belt states under a uniform swing.
If Biden loses Virginia, which was a solidly Republican state in presidential elections when I moved there in 2002 but has voted Democrat the last four cycles, Trump will win in a blowout the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1988. I would bet substantial money that against that outcome. But I do think it highly likely that Trump wins historically red states that he narrowly lost last time, especially Georgia.
Indeed, I think Silver’s scenario, where Biden needs wins in all three of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, is pretty likely absent in some major development between now and November. And, given Trump’s amazing resiliency, losing very little support for things that would destroy any other politician, I don’t even know what would constitute a “major development” at this point.
And, again, the key thing is that this is 50 state contests, not a single national election:
[I]f the Electoral College/popular vote gap looks anything like it did in 2016 or 2020, you’d expect Biden to be in deep trouble if the popular vote is roughly tied. So if we’re being honest, pundits who obsess over whether Biden is 1 point ahead or behind in national polls are kind of missing the point. Because national polls being tied don’t make for a toss-up race — but instead one where Trump has a material advantage in the Electoral College. In fact, the race looks a lot like 2012 in reverse, when national polls were often close but the swing state polls consistently favored Obama and gave him the far more robust map.
Silver follows this with a long discourse explaining why he doesn’t think the relatively good economy or the traditional incumbency advantage warrant a significant adjustment from a polls-only view of the race. Essentially, he doesn’t think the economy is all that good and thinks the incumbency advantage has largely gone away because of partisan polarization. I’ll leave to the interested reader to click over for themselves for the more nuanced explanation.
The rest of the post is paywalled but several news organizations are either paying or have been given access to the remainder and the bottom line is this:
That’s a much narrower Electoral College win than 2016 despite a much closer popular vote. Again, I don’t have access to the state-by-state breakdowns.
We’re roughly four months from the election but, again, I expect changes at the margins. The two candidates are simply too well-known for many people to change their minds.
