Notes on the Front

In a little over seven weeks Americans will go to the polls.  So here is a summary of US polling in the Presidential election.  Currently, Joe Biden is leading in the national polls but as you may know, the American electorate does not directly elect the President.  The Electoral College elects the President.  The College is elected by people voting in their individual states which hold equal to the number of Senator and House representatives which are broadly proportional to their population (California has 55 votes, Alaska has 3 votes).  Sometimes the result can be perverse:  in 2016 Hilary Clinton won the national vote but Donald Trump won the Electoral College.

In 2016 Trump won 304 Electoral College votes to Clinton’s 227.  Actually, the count should have been 306 to 232 but seven electors voted for minor candidates.  So Biden needs to win 38 more electoral votes to be elected President.

Most states are fairly predictable.  California and New York are going Democrat; Oklahoma and Mississippi will vote Republican.  But there are a number of swing or competitive states which could go either way and will determine the winner. With the exception of Nevada and New Hampshire, all the competitive states were won by Trump in 2016.

What I will do here – and hopefully every Sunday – is summarise polling in these individual states.  I will use two polling aggregators:  FiveThirtyEight and the Economist’s Forecasting the US Elections.  Here’s what they are telling us on September 13^th.  This uses the US electoral colours – blue is Democrats and red is Republican.

Looking first at states won by Republicans in 2016, Biden leads in most of them.  Florida is a key state.  It has 29 votes – which would make up most of the 38 Biden needs.  While he holds the lead here – between two and three percent – it is fairly tight.

If we turn to the mid-east states, Biden has stronger leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  In 2016, Trump won each of these states with a margin of less than one percent.  Together, these make up 46 votes – enough to elect Biden.

If Biden can manage to win one of the southern states (Georgia, North Carolina, Texas), he’d be in a very strong position. 

Looking at states won by Democrats in 2016, Biden currently holds comfortable leads.

If these polling results were replicated on election night, Biden would win comfortably.

But as they say, it is early days.  And the outcome in many states is within the margin of error.  And a number of polling companies called it wrong in several states in 2016. 

Next week we will hopefully start seeing trends:  is Trump closing the gap?  Is Biden holding firm?  Or even expanding his lead?