Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is the polling front-runner as he and President Trump enter the final stretch of their 2020 campaigns, and Republicans are hoping he’ll stumble before their Nov. 3 finish line like Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
The 2020 presidential cycle has been repeatedly rocked by news events, ranging from the coronavirus pandemic to social unrest, but the race’s polling has remained remarkably stable. Until now.
Biden has led by high single digits since the summer, yet a flurry of fall polls during the last week have put him in front by 13, 14, even 16 points. He’s now ahead by an average of 9.2 percentage points a month before Election Day, according to RealClearPolitics.
An NBC and Wall Street Journal poll conducted after last week’s raucous and acrimonious opening debate had Biden, the two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator, with a 14-point advantage on Trump
The poll, fielded before Trump tested positive for COVID-19, found 53% of respondents supported Biden compared to 39% who backed Trump when 800 registered voters across the country were asked for their opinions. That’s a widening of his 8-point lead from the outlets’ Sept. 20 survey, when Biden earned 51% of the vote to Trump’s 43% among 1,000 registered voters.
Trump supporters were quick to dredge up a similar poll by the outlets from October 2016.
In that poll, Clinton had 52% support over Trump’s 38% among 500 registered voters, that 14-point margin marked a spike from a 7-point edge the previous month. Clinton obviously lost the contest weeks later with 227 electoral votes to Trump’s 304, but won the popular vote by 2 points, 48% to 46%, or 2.9 million votes.
Spencer Kimball, Emerson College Polling director, said this weekend’s NBC and Wall Street Journal poll “did raise an eyebrow.”
“I noticed the poll was of registered voters, which we find increases Biden’s vote among these potential voters,” he said, as opposed to a methodology that relies on likely voters.
But for Kimball, the weekend’s findings weren’t that different from a CNBC poll pushed immediately after the first debate that had Biden with 54% support to Trump’s 41% among 925 likely voters.
And that poll was followed by a Tuesday CNN survey that said Biden attracted 57% of the vote and Trump 41% among 1,001 likely voters, some of whom were quizzed after Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis.
Barry Burden, director of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center, agreed Trump polled better among likely voters than surveys simply interviewing registered voters.
The NBC and Wall Street Journal‘s weekend poll was more reliable than its parallel survey, he noted. That’s because its sample size was larger, and it reflected “others on standard measures such as the president’s job approval rating, where Trump stands at 43%.”
“But each poll is nonetheless a snapshot, and an imperfect one at that,” the professor said.
He added, “A gap of 14 points seems unrealistic, but we should keep in mind that the survey is based on a sample and comes with a margin of error. The true gap between the candidates could potentially be larger but it could also be much smaller.”
Middlebury College professor Bertram Johnson warned, too, that the double-digit polls could be outliers, recommending surveys be considered in groups rather than by themselves. And he cast doubt as well on Republican beliefs that history from four years ago will repeat itself in four weeks.
“The difference between the two cycles is that Biden’s lead in 2020 is more stable and consistent in the polling averages than Clinton’s was in 2016,” he said.
2020’s other distinguishing feature is that Trump is gunning for a second term, according to Johnson. Given that it’s a referendum on the incumbent, scores of voters have already made up their minds regarding their ballot.
Critics like to grumble about poll accuracy. But Johnson reminded that many of those complained-about 2016 surveys assessing the national popular vote were “pretty close to correct that year, though some state-level polls were off by more.”
“The closer the race is to 50-50, the more consequential these state-level variations could be to the outcome,” he said. “As it stands, Biden has a clear lead, although almost certainly not a 14-point lead. A lot can happen in a month, of course — heck, a lot has happened in the last week.”
