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 does today. He has been stuck about 6 points behind Joe Biden for the last couple of months and shows no signs of improving… yet. Still, a deficit this large is not a death sentence. Per my modeling, Trump retains a 30-40% chance of winning based on this measure. (But keep in mind it is not the only measure!)
The economy is really bad now….
Growth has been pretty mild since 2015:
…and that’s bad news for Trump
Historically, presidents lose voters when the economy turns sour. A recession this sever would doom most incumbents. However, Trump is not most incumbents. Extreme partisan polarization might just keep him in the White House. That’s a hard caveat to model, but hopefully, we can do something about it. In the meantime, this is what the traditional “fundamentals” political science model (the president’s approval rating + GDP growth in the second quarter of the election year) say we should expect at the state level:
Trump’s approval bounce from covid is fading
A new poll from YouGov this morning found Trump’s ratings where they were before the outbreak of coronavirus:
So did a new national poll released by Monmouth University today.
Biden is the clear favorite, but not guaranteed a win
The 2016 election ought to have taught most political observers and election watchers that it’s foolish to treat the political climate, especially one this far out from an election, as either stable or all that predictive of the one that follows. Polls, the economy and the competitiveness of key states today forecast a Biden victory. But arriving at a probability is hard, and relying on different types of information and methods produces different predictions:
So, things are uncertain. But that doesn’t blind us from the signal. Today, with the 2020 general election campaign starting in earnest, Donald Trump is a clear underdog. But it’s also easy to see his path to victory.