September 6, 2020
If you are like me, you probably check the latest Trump vs. Biden polls regularly. As of today, Joe Biden has an average national lead of 7.1%. At this date in 2016, Hilary Clinton average national poll lead over Donald Trump was 3%. On election day, she won the national popular vote by 2.1%.
But as we all know, Clinton lost almost all of the so-called battleground states. In fact, Trump won all but one battleground state, by an average difference of 1.23%, as the table below shows.
| STATE | BIDEN % LEAD | 2016 RESULTS % | TRUMP ELECT.VOTE |
| FLORIDA | 1.8 | -1.2 | 29 |
| WISCONSIN | 4 | -0.7 | 10 |
| MICHIGAN | 2.6 | -0.3 | 16 |
| PENNSYLVANIA | 3.5 | -0.7 | 20 |
| MINNOSOTA | 5.3 | 1.5 | (10)* |
| ARIZONA | 5 | -3.5 | 11 |
| NORTH CAROLINA | 0.6 | -3.7 | 15 |
| AVERAGE | 3.25 | -1.22 | 101 |
Currently, Biden has an average poll lead in all six states of 3.3%. In 2016, Hilary Clinton lost six of these states by an average of 1.2%, giving Donald Trump 101 electoral votes of his 306 total. If you do the math, without these six states his total electoral vote would have been 205, 65 short of the required 270 votes needed for victory. A graphic representation of this difference between Biden’s poll lead and Trump’s
BLUE BARS ARE TRUMP”S % FINAL ELECTION RESULT.
Today, Trump is behind in every single one of these swing states, but only by an average of 3.3%!
If Trump can keep his base states (205 electoral votes), he can keep the keys to to the White House by winning Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania for a total of 70 electoral votes, some five more than he needs. He is currently behind Biden in these three states by an average of only 2.6%. And the latest Monmouth University poll now has Biden leading in Pennsylvania by 3.5%, down from his 13-point lead in July.
The point here is that this race is extremely close and the outcome dependent not on winning the popular vote but instead just winning a combination of these swing states.
