Is there a reluctance to acknowledge that Donald Trump is a serious underdog for reelection?
Back in 2012, the number-cruncher Nate Silver’s career took off like a rocket ship because he was explaining the polls, which showed that Barack Obama was very likely to win, and which states he was likely to win. And Silver called them all correctly. It was a story New York Times readers wanted to read, as it predicted an outcome happy for them, and reassured them they were more numerate and trusting of trustworthy authorities than the people who were “unskewing” the polls.
In 2016, the polls reflected the reality of a close election in which Hillary Clinton had a persistent but tiny lead among the populace as a whole. Trump’s win was within their margins of predictions. But, the general expectation set by the media was that Trump would surely lose.
The Economist’s current election model shows that the likeliest type of result for 2020 is a strong win for Joe Biden.
Here’s the electoral map as we start the year in earnest. The model thinks Joe Biden is favored to win about 331 electoral votes come November. pic.twitter.com/tSWt7sZEeY
— G. Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) June 11, 2020
This comes after the pile-up of evidence that Joe Biden is performing much better than Hillary Clinton among constituencies that swing and that that broke for Trump in 2016: elderly voters, voters who hate both parties. (There’s some debate about whether Joe Biden is better at motivating black voters than Hillary Clinton, or whether Donald Trump is doing better in 2020 with them than in 2016.)
Trump is an underdog. He was very unpopular in 2016 as well — in fact, slightly less popular overall than the loser Hillary Clinton. Joe Biden is not this unpopular.