Biden will probably win … but he might not.
Going into the final weekend of the presidential campaign, a trove of new national polling shows Democratic nominee Joe Biden with a comfortable lead. But, of course, the vote for president is not a national election. It’s a series of state-by-state elections that determine the winner of the Electoral College. Here, Biden’s edge is more muted, but still substantial. And whether looked at nationally or statewide, there’s simply no sign of a late change in either direction. Trump is not suffering from the new spike in Covid-19 cases, nor is he gaining ground based on the final debate or his last-ditch efforts to attack Hunter Biden. That stability is good news for Biden. He had a solid lead in the polls four months ago, but there was still much uncertainty as to the ultimate outcome. That the many subsequent events — conventions, protest and unrest, multiple debates, the president’s Covid-19 illness and recovery — left the race largely steady means that Biden’s odds of victory have grown substantially, even if his polling lead has not. Trump has a clear path to win, but it’s not especially probable. On the other hand, the Economist’s super-bullish odds for Biden say that the likelihood of Trump winning is 4 percent, or about as likely as Steph Curry missing a free throw — a rare occurrence, but certainly something that happens. FiveThirtyEight gives Biden about an 11 percent chance; if someone told you a given restaurant gave food poisoning to 11 percent of its clients, you probably would not eat there. In non-election scenarios, the kind of odds Trump is facing would be understood as involving a fair amount of risk. The national polls show a strong Biden lead More than a dozen national surveys were released Thursday, all showing Biden in the lead and averaging to something in the high single digits. His best result came from the USC Dornsife tracking poll (which has a somewhat unorthodox methodology) and registered a gigantic 12-point lead. Trump’s best poll came from Rasmussen, which invariably delivers Republican-leaning results and still showed Biden up 1 point. All in all, the RealClearPolitics unweighted national average shows Biden up 7.8 points. Crucially, in that average, Biden is over 50 percent — so even if every single undecided voter and third-party supporter decided to flock to Trump in a desperate pro-malarkey surge, Biden would still have the lead. Remarkably, throughout the entire campaign there’s been essentially no shot of Trump actually winning more votes than his opponent, and that continues to be true on the eve of the election.
