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Final Polls Roundup

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Final Presidential and other election polling is now coming in. Various analysts and pollsters are (gingerly) predicting various outcomes: from some who suggest Donald Trump may do better than many think to Democratic strategist James Carville who predicts a Joe Biden victory will be known by 10 p.m. EST election night.


The USC poll, which has a solid reputation, has Biden 12 points ahead of Trump:

President Trump heads into the final, frenetic 48 hours of campaign 2020 having lost ground among key groups that powered his drive to the presidency four years ago, the final USC Dornsife poll of the election shows.

Former Vice President Joe Biden leads Trump by double digits nationally — 54% to 43% in the poll’s daily tracking, a margin that has remained almost unchanging since summer. Biden’s support has ticked down just slightly from the high it reached after the first debate between the two candidates in late September; but overall, the poll has barely budged since USC began its daily tracking of the race in August.

That’s consistent with most other major surveys. The final NBC-Wall St. Journal poll of the campaign, for example, shows Biden leading 52% to 42%, a result nearly identical to what that survey found in January.

“So much has happened in the past 10 months of this year — impeachment, George Floyd’s murder, Black Lives Matter, fires and floods, RBG’s death, and yet the presidential trial heat has not changed,” veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who oversees that poll with Republican pollster Bill McInturff, wrote in an email. “The voters know the stakes, they care and they have been very consistent and constant in their vote since January.”

Another key measure has also remained extremely stable — the images of the candidates. Just over half of voters, 51%, have a favorable view of Biden, compared with 47% who view him unfavorably, the poll found. Trump’s image remains deep underwater: 59% see him unfavorably, including 48% who have an extremely unfavorable view, compared with 39% who see him favorably.

Biden’s relative popularity stands in sharp contrast to 2016, when majorities had unfavorable impressions of both Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s favorite pollster Scott Rasmussen puts Biden 7 points ahead:

In 2016, the polling averages showed Hillary Clinton with a three-point lead over Donald Trump. She ended up winning the popular vote by two points but losing the Electoral College.

This year, the polling averages give Joe Biden a much bigger advantage—7 percentage points. My polling for JustTheNews.com over the past month has also consistently shown the former Vice President with a 7 or 8 point advantage.The strength of Biden’s position is also evident in my Battleground State polling here at PoliticalIQ.In the three midwestern states that shocked the world and put the president over the top in 2016, my final polls show Biden leading by seven in Michigan, six in Wisconsin, and six in Pennsylvania. Four years ago, the polls showed much closer races in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

In Florida and North Carolina, a pair of must-win states for Trump, my latest 2020 numbers show Biden up by four points and one point respectively. Bluntly, the president cannot be re-elected without winning both of those states.

Go to the link to read the rest.

Larry Sabato’s highly regarded Crystal Ball issued its final summary article on the election. This is from the email newsletter:

— Our final Electoral College ratings show Joe Biden at 321 electoral votes and Donald Trump at 217.

— Democrats are narrow favorites to capture a Senate majority, 50-48 with two Toss-ups — the two Georgia races, both of which we think are likely to go to runoffs.

— We have Democrats netting 10 seats in the House.

— The only governorship we have flipping is Montana, which would be a gain for Republicans.

Sabato is the Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, where he is also the founder and director of the Center for Politics. Right now it’s site can’t be reached, most likely due to this article. The email also included this:

Our final ratings
Is it possible that Donald Trump will win a second term as president?

Yes.

Do the data point to that happening?

No.

As we survey the political landscape a day before the election, we see a race that has largely been steady. Even before he was the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden seemed like the strongest potential challenger to Donald Trump. Perhaps that said more about the Democratic field than Biden himself, and he is hardly an inspiring candidate, but the former vice president has been able to bring together the Democratic Party’s warring factions — at least for now — and keep the focus of the election on the sitting president. A worldwide pandemic challenged Trump’s mettle — and he is in a considerably weaker position because of it.

We have kept looking for indicators that the president was catching up. It is likely the case that the president was in worse shape in the aftermath of the first debate and his hospitalization for COVID-19 than he is now, but it’s really just a question of the size of his deficit. Both our Democratic and Republican sources generally see Biden as a strong favorite to surpass the requisite 270 electoral votes to win.

Polling released over the weekend provided a few bright spots for Trump, particularly a Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll conducted by respected pollster J. Ann Selzer showing Trump up a surprising 48%-41% in Iowa. A similar poll released four years ago proved a harbinger of Hillary Clinton’s weakness with white voters in small cities and rural areas across the Midwest.

However, there were plenty of other surveys over the weekend from other pollsters we respect that told a different story, a story that has been consistent throughout the campaign — Biden is polling markedly better with whites compared to Clinton’s performance, and he has built durable leads in the key states of Michigan and Wisconsin, and a smaller but seemingly real edge in Pennsylvania.

Is it possible that Selzer and some other polls that have been good for Trump are right, and the others are wrong? Sure. Among our sources — and among us — there is a persistent worry that pollsters have simply misconstrued the white vote. In this scenario, the president’s strength among white voters would either be undiminished from 2016 and/or a wave of newly registered or activated Trump voters would come out of the woodwork Tuesday to save the president. This may be real, and the product of a carefully executed plan hatched years ago, or it may be wishful thinking by the president’s supporters.

One politically experienced friend of the Crystal Ball subscribes to this theory and believes in his gut that Trump will win. He also said that if he were in our shoes, he’d have to pick Biden too — because that is what the data suggest is the proper handicap. One doesn’t need to come up with a theory of hidden voters to believe Biden is the favorite. That’s just where the data lead, in our judgment.

USA Today:

Most of the final polls of the 2020 election season have rolled in, and they show the race between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden has tightened since mid-October, both nationally and in battleground states.

Biden’s lead in USA TODAY’s average of averages, which is based on data from RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight, reached double-digits on Oct. 12, but has since fallen back to a 7.5-percentage point lead. That leaves him back roughly in the same position USA TODAY found him in its first poll roundup on Sept. 28, when his polling average lead over Trump was 7.2 points.

After some swings, several of the battleground states’ polling averages are very close to where they were more than a month ago – before the debates, and the tumult caused by the White House coronavirus outbreak that included the president.

Biden’s average lead in Pennsylvania – a state crucial for both candidates’ election hopes – was 4.8 points at the end of September, now, it is down to 3.8. An NBC News/Marist College poll released Monday showed Biden up 51%-46% among likely voters in the state.

As with Biden, the polls were in Hillary Clinton’s favor the day before she lost to Trump in the 2016 election, though Clinton’s lead at this point in 2016 was less than half that enjoyed by Biden.

Also:
–ABC News poll

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