What Went Down In Michigan, Washington And Other Democratic Primaries

Biden has a 99 percent chance of winning Michigan, according to our forecast, and leads Sanders by 23.4 points in the polls. If you have a sense of déjà vu, you’re not alone. Sanders trails Biden by roughly the same margin he trailed Hillary Clinton in 2016. We know how that turned out: In a surprising upset, Sanders went on to win Michigan by 1.4 points.

It was one of the biggest polling misses ever. The misfire resulted from a series of underestimations, including miscalculating turnout and support for Sanders among young voters, independent voters’ participation and Sanders’s support among black voters. One complicating problem for pollsters then, too, was they lacked recent data for modeling the primary electorate. Michigan held a primary in 2008, but it wasn’t sanctioned because of rules violations, and Barack Obama didn’t contest it. This means the last meaningful primary before 2016 happened all the way back in 1992! (The 2000 and 2004 contests were caucuses.)

So could lightning strike twice for Sanders?

Never say never, but we’re skeptical. Polling misses on this scale rarely happen, and moreover, it’s not clear that working-class white voters are a strength for Sanders this year as they were in 2016. Instead, as Nate Cohn of The New York Times’s The Upshot points out, they might be more of a strength for Biden.

Fool us once, Michigan polls, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us.

There’s an added wrinkle in Michigan. Since the state has vastly expanded absentee voting this year, we don’t know the mix of absentee versus early votes, either in terms of who did better in each vote or in what order they’re being reported. The results so far are clearly good for Biden in that they’re what you’d expect if Biden wins, although they’re not great for him (i.e. probably not a 25-point blowout). But an absentee versus election day voting gap means there’s more uncertainty there than you might think.

To Clare’s larger point, though: I can’t imagine the Trump campaign is super happy with how the Democratic primary has developed.