The Electoral College: The Fringe of the Map Expands
SABATO'S CRYSTAL BALLTrump’s position has been perilously weak for a month and a half.
— With Joe Biden’s national lead around eight to 10 points, there is a possibility that he could compete for some usually Republican states.
— Our current ratings represent something of a hedge between a Trump comeback and Biden maintaining or expanding his large national lead.
The Electoral College fringe expands
We are now about six weeks into a downturn in Donald Trump’s polling numbers.It’s worth thinking about the ramifications of this change if it endures.
In the RealClearPolitics average of national approval polling, Trump went from about early December to late May without ever dipping below -10 in net approval (approval minus disapproval). He has spent every day since June 1 at or below -10 net approval, and he’s currently at about -15.
Joe Biden’s national polling lead over Trump during May was in the four-to-six-point range. That was a decent lead, but not one that suggested Biden was a towering favorite, particularly because Trump was able to win in 2016 without winning the popular vote. But since early June, Biden’s lead has ballooned to the eight-to-10-point range. He has also enjoyed healthy leads in many polls of the most important swing states, like Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The bottom line here is that the nation is in a state of terrible crisis, and the public has, at least for now, judged the president’s responses to both coronavirus and protests of racial inequalities in policing to be lacking.
In an ABC News/Ipsos poll released Friday, 67% of respondents disapproved of Trump’s handling of coronavirus and of race relations.
2020 is shaping up to be a bad year in American history, which Republican lobbyist Bruce Mehlman illustrates in his latest look at the political environment. It is not the kind of year when one wants to be an incumbent running for reelection, and a majority of the public appears to believe that this president is not meeting the moment.
A few weeks into the public health crisis, we explored the possibility of Trump being the second iteration of Jimmy Carter, whose reelection bid fell apart among myriad crises in 1980. Since then, the Trump-as-Carter scenario has grown even more plausible.
There is time for the situation to change — as we wrote a few weeks ago, we want to see where things stand after the conventions, around Labor Day. But Trump is extremely unlikely to win if the polls continue to look the way they do now. And if these numbers represent a new normal, we need to account for the possibility that this election won’t be particularly close, and that new states may come into play. In other words, if the national picture remains bleak for Trump, then the slippage he’s seen from earlier this year wouldn’t just be limited to a handful of swing states.
Over the past few weeks, there have been some interesting little nuggets here and there about the map expanding into red turf. The very well-sourced New York Times trio of Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, and Alexander Burns recently reported that internal Republican data showed Trump with only a small lead in Montana and trailing in Kansas, two states that Trump carried by about 20 points apiece in 2016 (both have competitive Senate races, too).
Enterprising members of the #ElectionTwitter community spearheaded a fundraising campaign to poll under-polled states: Public Policy Polling, the Democratic pollster, stepped up and polled Alaska and Montana on their behalf, with the money raised going to charity. Trump was up 48%-45% in Alaska and 51%-42% in Montana. (The #ElectionTwitter polling project remains underway, and we have supported them and we encourage others to as well at their GoFundMe page.)
Democratic pollster Garin-Hart-Yang had Biden up two points in Missouri, a 19-point Trump state; an earlier poll for Missouri Scout conducted by Remington Research, a GOP firm, had Trump up eight. On Monday, polling from Saint Louis University/YouGov had Trump up by a similar 50%-43% margin.
A UtahPolicy.com/KUTV 2 News poll of Utah had Trump up just 44%-41% there in late May, although the pollster (Y2 Analytics) later re-weighted the poll by education, which suggested a lead for Trump more in the six-to-10-point range, depending on which weighting was used (the Y2 post includes a thoughtful discussion of education weighting, an important factor in polling and something that might have contributed to some Democratic bias in state polls in 2016).
One other caveat comes from friend of the Crystal Ball Dan Guild, who has noticed that in the last three elections, some summer polling has seriously overstated eventual November Democratic performance in red states. That may be a factor now.
But Trump’s position is weak enough in mid-July that we have to concede there are some signs of competitiveness in states that were not competitive in 2016. This sort of thing can happen when the overall election is tilted toward one side over the other, which is the state of play at the moment and the advantage Biden currently holds.
Our current electoral map represents something of a hedge between Trump cutting markedly into Biden’s lead versus Biden maintaining his current edge or even expanding it.
In the former scenario, all of these states we’ve moved into Likely Republican would move back into the Safe Republican camp, and states like Michigan and Pennsylvania (which we rate as Leans Democratic) as well as Toss-ups like Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin could all be on the razor’s edge. These six states remain the core battlegrounds that seem likeliest, collectively, to decide the election.
In the latter scenario, where Biden continues to do very well, most or all of those core battleground states would be more like Leans Democratic (or even Likely, at least in some cases); Leans Republican states like Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas would be more like Toss-ups; and some of the states we’ve flagged in today’s update could be in play.
As it stands now, our ratings account for both of these scenarios.
We think we’ll get more clarity about which scenario is more likely following the conventions — whatever the conventions actually look like. Even with 2020’s scaled down, undramatic, and overshadowed conventions, voters and media see them as departure points into the general election. Casting a ballot is no longer just on the distant horizon. It’s a reality that will firm up people’s choices — and our ratings.