Joe Biden starts the 2020 general election as the clear favorite

Joe Biden is currently running ahead of Donald Trump nationally and in key states, but he is not guaranteed a victory

Bernie Sanders announced today that he is ending his bid for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Though his failure to win was evident as soon as the Super Tuesday primaries last month (or what seems like a decade ago under quarantine), it was too early to write this piece back then. But we can appropriately turn our gaze toward November now that Sanders is officially out of the running.

Our attention now shifts to the general election campaign and the race to 270 electoral college votes. There, it’s Joe Biden vs Donald Trump—in that order. I’ve collated some bits and pieces of information from tweets I’ve posted over the last couple of weeks that tell a pretty consistent story about the 2020 election. Now, on what we might call the first official day of the campaign, let me enter them into the newsletter of record with some explanatory annotations.

Trump is at a historic disadvantage in the national polls

Since 1948, no incumbent president has polled as poorly as Donald Trump …