6 Days Out: Blockbuster State Polls Show Major Gains For Biden, But National Polls Show Tightening of Race
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With 6 days to go until Election Day, the national averages show continued narrowing between former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump. But state surveys like the bombshell ABC News/Washington Post Wisconsin poll are making headlines. Here’s what’s happening in the polls today:
The National Picture
It’s important to understand that the FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics polling averages, the leading aggregates of polls, are very different from each other. You can read about those differences here.
As of this writing, the RCP average has Biden up 7.1 points over Trump, a narrowing of 3/10 of a point and a continuation of a glacial trend. The FiveThirtyEight average shows a more significant narrowing, with Biden at 51.6 percent to Trump’s 43.1 percent — putting Trump more than half a point closer to Biden in that average.
The new narrower averages include Trump retaking a seesaw lead over Biden in the pro-Trump Rasmussen poll, whose methodology typically produces more favorable results for the president than other polls, and an Emerson poll that has Biden only up by five points — but which has consistently shown a much tighter race than other polls.
However, the FiveThirtyEight average is more stable and accounts for pollster quality, and the movement in that average is double what it RCP shows. The narrowing is real, but currently still glacially-paced.
Battleground States
Most of the fun today is in the state polls, where that ABC News/WaPo poll showing Biden up 17 points has tongues wagging.
Biden retains his lead in most of the “Top Battleground” states that RCP tracks: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Arizona, and Trump’s slim lead of 4 tenths of a point in hotly-contested Florida is unchanged since yesterday. But that Wisconsin poll pried the whole battleground average wider by two-tenths of a point.
The averages in North Carolina and Arizona ticked slightly up in Biden’s favor, but his lead in the Wisconsin average shot up by almost two and-a-half points.
About that poll, though… FiveThirtyEight has declared that despite a “gold standard” methodology and pedigree, it was “definitely an outlier” — while also making the case that polls in neighboring states show the movement in Biden’s direction is real.
Biden’s lead in the RCP and 538 Michigan averages narrowed slightly, but several new polls show leads of anywhere between five and ten points. And crucially, Biden is crushing Trump by more than 32 points with seniors in a new Detroit News poll — a whopping 27-point improvement from September.
In fun, perhaps less battleground-y state news, Biden is also poised to win the state of California by the largest margin in history for a Democrat — 36 points — according to a new poll, and he’s nipping at the all-time record of 42 points set in 1920 when Republican Warren G. Harding beat Democrat James Cox. Oh to have moderated the Harding/Cox debates.
The Senate Picture
RCP’s forecast now shows Democrats with a shot at 54 seats, while FiveThirtyEight has them with a chance at landing on a 55-45 majority — unchanged since our last update. Democrats’ chances of winning control of the Senate have ticked up a few points to 75 percent.
Michigan Democratic incumbent Sen. Gary Peters leads in a raft of new polls out Wednesday, including an 8-point advantage in the “A+”-rated New York Times/Siena College poll.
North Carolina has shown some slight movement in favor of Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham since yesterday on the strength of new polls showing him with leads of between 3 and 7 points over Sen. Thom Tillis.
Check back with us daily for updates on the state of play going into this hotly-contested election, and remember to stay hydrated.
