As of today, there are 99 days left until election day, and hopefully, not much longer before the US has a President for the first time since Obama left office. It would be hard for things to look much better for Joe Biden.
The polls say things are looking very good for former Vice President Joe Biden. Polling averages show the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee ahead in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona. And some eye-popping surveys even have him leading President Donald Trump in Texas, which hasn’t gone for a Democrat since 1976. But is it all too good to be true? Many Democrats certainly seem to think so.
“I don’t trust polling,” Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell recently told the Atlantic. “I don’t believe that Biden is 16 points up in Michigan; that’s a bullshit poll, and it’s the same people who said Hillary [Clinton] had it in the bag.”
Dingell is among the Democrats traumatized by polling missteps last cycle, which led surveys to overlook the strength of Trump’s support in key battleground states including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — three states Clinton was counting on to win the election. In a late-October survey of Wisconsin, for example, the Marquette Law School poll had Clinton up by 6 percentage points, while Trump ultimately won the state by 0.7 points.
After the election, pollsters conducted an autopsy of why there was such a disconnect between state polls and the final electoral outcomes (though perhaps less so than some Democrats believe).
The review, led by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), identified multiple factors: For one, some pollsters failed to weight for education — so more educated individuals who favored Hillary Clinton were overrepresented in samples and skewing the results. For another, many surveys missed the wave of undecided voters who may have broken for Trump at the last minute.
Importantly, as many pollsters frequently emphasize, the way polls are interpreted also matters: These surveys, after all, are intended to be a “snapshot” in time, and not necessarily predictive of the election’s final result. It’s worth noting, too, that there are variables that make every cycle different: According to a mid-July New York Times analysis, because of the polling lead he currently has, Biden would still win key battleground states if the polls had errors comparable to the ones they saw in 2016… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Vox>
Map credit: medium.com
Trump won these key states in 2016. Now, he’s losing them
Of course, the worst thing we can do is to become complacent and overconfident. That could give Trump* at least four more years man maybe make him permanent Fuhrer of the Republican Fifth Reich. Nevertheless, day after day of ever increasing horrors can tire us to the point of PTSD. Therefore, it’s important that we recognize the light at the end of the tunnel to give us hope. Go, Joe! Go!
RESIST!!
If you click on only one thing today, let it be Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Thursday morning speech, delivered from the House floor and directed to a fellow member of Congress, but really to us all.
