If you follow my work, you know that I tend to be pessimistic about President Joe Biden’s re-election chances. There are many reasons for this – for example, he is trailing in the polls both nationally and in swing states, and has an approval rating of less than 40%.
But sometimes it’s worth taking a step back and analyzing the counterargument. Biden has endured arguably two of the worst weeks for a president running for re-election and is still within earshot of former President Donald Trump.
If we average national polls since the debate 15 days ago, Trump is ahead by 3 points. An NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll released on Friday morning (12) put the race at between 50% for Biden and 48% for Trump (a result within the margin of error).
No one should feel comfortable calling the presidential race with these kinds of poll results. Since 1972, the average difference between polls at this time and the final result has been 6 points.
Sometimes disputes change much more than that. Democrat Michael Dukakis led Republican George HW Bush by mid-to-high single digits at this point in 1988 before the party conventions. When the race ended, Bush had defeated Dukakis by 8 points.
Biden and Trump’s own history should also make you think twice about calling this race off. Biden was ahead by 9 points in early July 2020 national polls. He ended up winning the national popular vote by just half that (4.5 points).
Such a change in Biden’s direction this time would put him at the top of the popular vote.
Of course, this election will ultimately come down to the crucial battleground states. Post-debate data from these states is limited, although the polls we had before the debate suggested that Biden was performing worse in these states, taken as a whole, than he was doing nationally.
Biden’s clearest path, according to public data (and both campaigns), remains through the northern swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Wins in all three would likely mean Biden could lose Arizona, George, Nevada and North Carolina and still pull out a victory.
Forecast models
Figuring out how to account for all this information (or lack thereof) to better understand the state of the race between Biden and Trump can be a challenge.
One way to do this is through forecasting models, which look at lots of data, including current national polls, current polls in swing states, the time until the election (i.e., how much the polls might change over time), and even the state of the economy (e.g., solid employment reports and less positive data on earnings growth).
I love checking out these forecasting models and have even helped build a few in the past because they help ground us in objective facts rather than subjective opinions. Models like these can’t account for everything (for example, we’ve never had a rematch between two presidents in the election era), but they’re much better than conjecture.
According to the average prediction model, Biden beats Trump about 30% of the time. Some might consider a 3 in 10 probability low. I wouldn’t read it that way.
If we believe the average of the current model, Biden has a better chance of winning this election than a flipped coin coming up heads twice in a row. Any young NFL student or captain can tell you that turning heads twice in a row happens all the time, despite it not being the most likely outcome.
For those obsessed with politics, a different example may hit closer to home. When I worked at FiveThirtyEight, we gave Trump about a 30% chance of defeating Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the 2016 election.
As I wrote at the time, Trump was a “normal polling error behind Clinton” – the idea was that the polls were close enough that Trump could win if the polls were off by a normal amount.
Today, the situation is a little different. Biden’s electoral college path appears to be narrower than Trump’s in 2016.
What Biden has that Trump didn’t have in 2016 is time. We have already seen in recent weeks, since the debate, that a lot can change in a short period.
So what do all these facts and figures mean?
I think it’s completely fair to say that Trump is the favorite and that Biden has his work cut out for him.
There is also data that suggests Vice President Kamala Harris would be a stronger Democratic candidate against Trump than Biden. (I tend to believe that Democrats would do better with Harris leading the presidential ticket.)
But if you currently think Biden can’t win, history would disagree with you.
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