Trump can win the election despite his lagging poll numbers, experts say
Democratic nominee Joe Biden is leading in the polls on Election Day, but experts say President Trump could still pull out a win.
How?
Much like he did in 2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million to challenger Hillary Clinton but won the Electoral College with 304 votes compared to Clinton’s 227.
Nationally, Biden is ahead by an average of 8.4 percentage points as of Tuesday morning, according to poll analysis site FiveThirtyEight. Poll aggregator RealClearPolitics shows him leading Trump by an average of 7.2 percentage points as of Tuesday.
The former vice president is “favored” to win, with an 89% chance compared to Trump’s 10%, according to FiveThirtyEight’s predictions.
But, the site says, “a 10 percent chance isn’t zero.”
Trump has a 3% chance of winning the popular vote, according to FiveThirtyEight. But even if he loses the popular vote, there’s an 8% chance he could win the Electoral College.
Nate Silver, founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, wrote on the website that Biden will need a “popular vote cushion” to win.
“If Biden wins the popular vote by 2 to 3 percentage points, the Electoral College is roughly a toss-up,” Silver wrote Sunday. “But if Biden wins the popular vote by less than 2 points, Trump is a fairly heavy favorite to win the election.”
Polling could be off
Trump’s “best-cast scenario” and what many of his supporters are depending on is that the polls are wrong, Politico reported based on interviews with experts.
While Biden is solidly ahead in many national polls, his lead is narrower in some key battleground states, which “may prove significant” if the polls are off, The New York Times reports.
But pollsters say that isn’t likely.
“Polls can be wrong — indeed, the whole point of our probabilistic forecast is to tell you the chances of that — but they’re more likely to be wrong when a candidate’s lead is narrower,” Silver wrote in another FiveThirtyEight piece published Saturday. “As of right now, Biden’s lead is large enough that Trump’s chances of winning are 10 percent, considerably lower than the 35 percent chance he had at this point in 2016.”
Additionally, the polls would have to be “off by way more” than in 2016 for Trump to win, Silver wrote.
In the Cook Political Report, Charlie Cook wrote over the summer that the 2016 polls weren’t actually wrong.
“This is the point at which I often hear that the 2016 polls were all wrong, or that people lie to pollsters, or that Trump voters simply don’t talk to pollsters,” Cook wrote. “These oft-repeated arguments ignore the fact that the national polls missed Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote margin by just one percentage point.”
It could come down to Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania — a key battleground state with 20 electoral votes — could tip the election.
FiveThirtyEight says it’s the most likely to “deliver the decisive vote” in the Electoral College, with a 36.5% chance.
In Pennsylvania, Biden is leading Trump in the polls by an average of 4.7 percentage points as of Tuesday morning, according to FiveThirtyEight. RealClearPolitics shows Biden leading in the state by an average of 1.2 percentage points.
Silver wrote that Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania is “solid but not spectacular.”
“Without Pennsylvania, Biden does have some paths to victory, but there’s no one alternative state he can feel especially secure about,” Silver wrote.
If Trump loses Pennsylvania, he has almost no chance of winning, according to reporting by Politico. And he’s unlikely to win overall if he doesn’t win at least one of the three upsets he carried in 2016: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, The New York Times reports.
In 2016, Wisconsin was the tipping-point state, which Clinton lost by less than a point, per FiveThirtyEight.
Court battles
The president has said the election will likely end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Republicans have already brought legal challenges against absentee ballot laws in some states, which The New York Times reports could “make the difference in a close election.”
Silver wrote that he’d “be worried about the meltdown that could occur” in the case of a recount or Electoral College tie.
“The odds are against it, but the stakes are awfully high,” Silver wrote.
If the election is close, the 6-3 conservative majority on the high court is likely to side with Trump, he wrote.
Trump “has to win in court … The one thing that is just repeating in my mind now is just the lack of any sort of margin for error for him,” Tom Bonier, CEO of the Democratic data firm TargetSmart, told Politico.
This story was originally published November 3, 2020 at 9:08 AM with the headline "Trump can win the election despite his lagging poll numbers, experts say."
