floridafan
Verified User
lection Day is now just three months away, and the overall trajectory of the race hasn’t changed much recently: Joe Biden continues to hold a sizable lead over President Trump. Biden is now up by 8 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average, and he has an advantage of 5 points or more in several key battleground states like Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Faced with these numbers, though, a lot of people — Republicans, Democrats and people with no particular party affiliation — raise a reasonable question: “Wasn’t Hillary Clinton leading in the polls too?”
Well, yes. But not quite like this. We compared Biden’s standing to where Clinton was at this point in the polls four years ago.1 We specifically chose this point in the cycle in 2016 because it’s about where Clinton hit her peak — on Aug. 7, 2016, following the Democratic National Convention, Clinton had a 7.5-point lead over Trump in national polls.
Clinton never topped that lead. But as you can see in the chart below, even at her post-convention peak, Clinton’s lead over Trump still wasn’t as large as Biden’s is now.
This means that the sizable advantage Biden currently holds isn’t the product of a convention-induced sugar high but rather the larger electoral environment, which is very poor for Trump. That’s no guarantee Biden’s lead will hold — it’s hard to know what the post-convention bounces will look like this year, for example, given that they’re remote affairs and scheduled back to back.
Continued in link:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/biden-is-polling-better-than-clinton-at-her-peak/
Faced with these numbers, though, a lot of people — Republicans, Democrats and people with no particular party affiliation — raise a reasonable question: “Wasn’t Hillary Clinton leading in the polls too?”
Well, yes. But not quite like this. We compared Biden’s standing to where Clinton was at this point in the polls four years ago.1 We specifically chose this point in the cycle in 2016 because it’s about where Clinton hit her peak — on Aug. 7, 2016, following the Democratic National Convention, Clinton had a 7.5-point lead over Trump in national polls.
Clinton never topped that lead. But as you can see in the chart below, even at her post-convention peak, Clinton’s lead over Trump still wasn’t as large as Biden’s is now.
This means that the sizable advantage Biden currently holds isn’t the product of a convention-induced sugar high but rather the larger electoral environment, which is very poor for Trump. That’s no guarantee Biden’s lead will hold — it’s hard to know what the post-convention bounces will look like this year, for example, given that they’re remote affairs and scheduled back to back.
Continued in link:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/biden-is-polling-better-than-clinton-at-her-peak/
