Biden Is Favored In Our Final Presidential Forecast, But …
It’s a fine line between a landslide and a nail-biter.
As I wrote in our final forecast overview, there wasn’t a lot of change over the past 24 or 48 hours, as most of the late polling either came in close to our previous polling averages, or came from — frankly — fairly random pollsters that don’t get a lot of weight in our forecast, which means the forecast didn’t shift that much.
Our final forecast had Biden with an 89 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, as compared to a 10 percent chance for Trump. (The remaining 1 percent reflects rounding error, plus the chance of an Electoral College tie.)
But the reason I say it's a fine line between a landslide and a nail-biter, is that it wouldn’t take that big of a polling error in Trump’s favor to make the election interesting.
Importantly, interesting isn’t the same thing as a likely Trump win; instead, the probable result of a 2016-style polling error would be a Biden victory but one that took some time to resolve and which could imperil Democrats’ chances of taking over the Senate. On the flip side, it wouldn’t take much of a polling error in Biden’s favor to turn 2020 into a historic landslide against Trump.
Biden’s standing is considerably stronger than Clinton’s at the end of the 2016 race, but a 10 percent chance of something happening isn’t a zero percent chance, and as I wrote earlier this week, Trump still has a path to the White House.