If the polls are EXACTLY as flawed as they were in 2016, this election will come right down to the wire
Do you think that you know who will win the election? Well, forecasting who will win elections is what the folks over at Fivethirtyeight do for a living, and in 2016 they told us on Election Day that Hillary Clinton had a 67 percent chance of winning. Needless to say, they were widely mocked when Trump was victorious, but that didn’t stop them. Today, Fivethirtyeight is projecting that Joe Biden has an 87 percent chance of winning this election, and that is a number that has stayed fairly stable in recent weeks. But of course their projections are primarily based on the same state polls that were deeply flawed in 2016, and so there is a very real possibility that they will be embarrassed once again in 2020.
The mainstream media likes to focus on the big national polls that show Joe Biden with a large lead, but the truth is that this election is going to be won or lost in just six absolutely critical swing states. Whichever candidate can win at least four of those six swing states is almost certain to win the election, and in this article I am going to focus on polling numbers in only those six states.
Florida
In 2016, the final RealClearPolitics average of Florida polls had Trump up by just 0.2 points, but he ended up winning the state by 1.2 points.
So Trump overperformed the polls by 1 point.
Right now, Joe Biden is leading by 1.8 points in the latest RCP average of Florida polls, but if you subtract one point from his lead that would make this a very, very tight race.
North Carolina
In 2016, the final RealClearPolitics average of North Carolina polls had Trump up by 1.0 points, but he ended up winning the state by 3.7 points.
So Trump overperformed the polls by 2.7 points in that case.
Today, the latest RCP average of polls shows Biden up by 1.2 points, but a swing of 2.7 points would put Trump in the lead.