Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

You should always take exit polls with a grain of salt. But a pandemic and the increase in mail-in voting have made exit polls even less reliable this year. Here, podcast host Galen Druke chats with quantitative editor Laura Bronner and elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich about how the exit polls will be done this year and what to make of them.

In case people are wondering what the Trump campaign is saying right now … they’re saying they’re more confident than they were in 2016! Which could well be true. In 2016, it was reported that the Trump campaign didn’t really expect to win at all. While this is certainly spin, I also find it pretty believable that many on the Trump team are in a different mindset this election night: They know that it’s going to be a high-turnout election, they know that there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding the ultimate fate of some mail-in ballots in some states, etc. While Trump is clearly the underdog in this race, it makes sense that the Trump operation’s self-conception has evolved over the course of four years.

Building on Lee’s post about how Sanders might have done in a general election against Trump, I recently conducted a national survey of Americans over 30, whom I have been tracking for 12 years. Ninety-two percent of respondents would have stuck with the same party regardless of the Democrats’ nominee, but 4 percent who were with Biden then said “neither” when asked to choose between Trump and Sanders — and another 1 percent backed Biden and then Trump. By contrast, just 1 percent backed Sanders but not Biden. So Biden does seem to hold onto a sliver of voters who said they wouldn’t back Sanders.