Presidential polls: The numbers that prove Biden is stronger than Obama and Clinton

Joe Biden is polling at this stage of the race not only far better than Hillary Clinton did in the entire 2016 cycle but also even better than the man for whom he served as vice president, Barack Obama.

Nationally, Biden is at 51.5 per cent, according to RCP averages of all the polls. President Obama never hit 50 per cent in his aggregate polling leading into his re-election in 2008. And 19 days before the election the past three cycles, no candidate, not even 2008 Obama, topped 50 per cent as Biden currently does.

According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s national polling advantage now is so large that the electoral college is not expected to come into play. While win probability isn’t about the election as much as it is about the accuracy of the polling, the site’s 40,000 simulations have Biden winning in 87 per cent of the time, most commonly by over 400 electoral votes.

Pulling an electoral vote rabbit out of the hat like in 2016, when he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by about three million, is Trump’s only plausible path to victory. And as of October 14, the map at RealClearPolitics assigns 197 electoral votes of the 270 needed to no candidate, due to the polling advantage not being decisive enough to take it out of this “toss-up” category. Biden has 216 votes clearly in his column compared with just 125 for Trump.

In 2016, on the eve of the election, RCP had Clinton leading Trump 203 to 164 with 171 in the “toss-up” category. Trump ended up winning 83 per cent of them.

In 2012, Obama won 89.7 per cent of the toss-ups, moving from 201 in the final estimate to 332 in the results of his election against Mitt Romney. And in 2008, Obama won 68 per cent of 128 toss-up electoral votes to beat John McCain, 365-173. 

Two things are important to observe here. The first is that Biden has locked down a higher share of the vote now than at the end of the prior two cycles, according to the RCP historic data. And toss-up states tend to break decidedly for one candidate — an average of 80 per cent since 2008. If that average proves true for Biden, he would win about 375 electoral votes. But if Trump gets the toss-up states to swing his way at that average rate, he would surpass (barely) his threshold for victory (achieving about 280 projected electoral votes).

The current polling in the toss-up/swing states indicates that Biden is far more likely to command a lion’s share of these at-large electoral votes. The former vice president is drawing 48.7 per cent of the sample in the swing states compared to just 44.2 per cent for Clinton in 2016. Combined with Trump’s share, undecided/third-party voters this cycle are less than half (6.2 points) of their total at the end of the last cycle (12.5 points). This leaves Trump far fewer persuadable voters than needed to topple Biden.

To make the swing states — and thus the election — a true toss up, Trump would need to win four out of five of the voters who currently are not committing to either candidate. That’s far in excess of the 57 per cent he won last cycle when he was the “change” candidate, versus the incumbent he is today.

Even worse for Trump, Biden is dominating the toss-up slate. Last cycle, these states were essentially split, nine with Clinton leading on the eve of the election and eight with Trump. Clinton ended up winning six of her nine and Trump seven of his eight. In the recent sample, Biden leads in 11 of 12, accounting for 151 of the 189 available votes (Trump is ahead only in Texas, 38).

Further complicating things for Trump is that state polling lags national polling. Since Biden has surged in the national polling the past couple of weeks, his present advantage at the state level is likely even greater than state polls are reflecting, according to the Princeton Election Consortium.