Updated: October 20, 2020 4:46:33 am
President Donald Trump and Joe Biden during a town hall-style event on Thursday (The New York Times).
With a fortnight to go until Election Day on November 3 in the US, the once encouraging lead of Democratic candidate Joe Biden over incumbent Republican Donald Trump has narrowed, leaving both campaigns on the edge.
Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a memo to donors, reported by Reuters: “We cannot become complacent because the most poignant truth is that Donald Trump can still win this race, and all the indications that we have show that this goes down to the wire. “
“New polls show that this election will come down to some swing states like North Carolina, Minnesota, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin … Simply put, we can win this, but we have to step up our campaign.” Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien said in a memo shared with his party’s campaign mailing list on Sunday.
Republicans have tried to maintain the “law and order” narrative, painting this summer’s Black Lives Matters protests as Biden-backed violence. More recently, in debates and city councils, the campaign has emphasized Biden’s tax plans. “Hello …” read a mass text message from the Trump campaign. “Biden will raise taxes. That’s right, that’s the text. “
Democrats have tried to focus on the pandemic and the need for a just and moral leader. “I feel deeply that this country needs to be a place to represent opportunities in the world,” Biden CFO Saloni Multani told The Indian Express. “I look at my girls and hope that that fundamental part of America remains. That’s on the ballot. We need a democracy that works for generations to come. “
With Biden’s lead in national polls, all conventional political understanding says he should win. But, the picture feels like deja vu for experts who recall former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s leadership in the polls in the run-up to the 2016 election. An NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll had Clinton in +10 percentage points over Trump back then. The same poll now has +11 for Biden. Survey aggregation by data analytics outlet FiveThirtyEight has Biden at +10.6.
Still, according to our forecast, Trump has a significant chance, slightly worse than the chances of rolling a 1 on a six-sided die and slightly better than the chances of it raining in downtown Los Angeles. And remember, it rains there, ”says a FiveThirtyEight review.
In American political experts, national polls need to be understood in conjunction with state-level dynamics. The Electoral College system gives each state a designated number of electoral votes that go to the candidate who wins the popular vote in that state.
Clinton won 48 percent of the popular vote, compared to Trump’s 46 percent in 2016. But he only got 232 electoral votes, compared to his 306. A candidate needs 270 of 538 electoral votes to win.
Most states have consistently voted for a party, leaving a very small number of states to move between parties and attract real campaigns on the battlefield. During the last five elections, since 2000, 15 states have consistently voted Democrats, adding 195 electoral votes. These states are primarily located on the west coast and northeast of the US A total of 21 states, most in Central America, have voted Republican since 2000, representing 176 electoral votes.
The solid blue and red states leave approximately 167 potential electoral votes in 14 states that have oscillated between parties. Of these 14 states, some have been particularly erratic or have offered large electoral votes.
There are three electoral maps that could give Trump another term, and he needs to win Florida in all of them. Beyond that, you need to win some combination of Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan to get the count. The last three were Trump’s biggest wins of 2016.
While Biden leads in double digits in most national polls, he has maintained a consistent, but single-digit, lead in several changing states. In Florida, it leads by 3.9 percentage points; Michigan 7.9; Pennsylvania 6.7; Wisconsin 7.4, Arizona 3.8. But some heavily skewed Republican swing states are also showing a Biden lead of 1% or less, like Georgia.
But some analysts say that Biden has maintained a stronger consistency in his numbers than Clinton. They add that the voting process has been refined since Clinton’s mistakes, including a new weighting for voters without a college degree.
Another possible boost for Biden’s campaign is its financial advantage over the increasingly cash-strapped Trump campaign. Where Trump had an intimidating ATM machine earlier in the season, Biden has now spent more than Trump on $ 124 million on political advertising.
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