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You are here: Home / 2020 Campaign / The Poll Would Have to Be Way Off for Trump to Win

The Poll Would Have to Be Way Off for Trump to Win

October 31, 2020 at 8:35 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Nate Silver: “There just hasn’t been any real sign that the race is tightening. If anything, Joe Biden’s margins are expanding slightly in the Upper Midwest. And there isn’t any particular reason to expect the race to tighten when more than 90 million people have already voted and the most important news story — that the United States just set a record for the number of COVID-19 cases in a day — is a negative one for Trump.”

“In fact, in many states, such as North Carolina, we’ve gotten what are likely to be the final polls of the state from most of the major polling firms. The one important exception is Pennsylvania, which some high-quality pollsters seem to have kept as the last state they’re planning to poll. And those polls could matter quite a bit. Pennsylvania is the most likely tipping-point state (it delivers the 270th electoral vote around 37 percent of the time in our forecast), so any deviation from Biden’s current 5.1-point lead in the polls there — say, if Biden climbs to a 6-point lead or falls to a 4-point lead — could make a fairly big difference in our forecast.”

“But what we’ve seen so far in Pennsylvania doesn’t suggest much movement in the polls.”

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Filed Under: 2020 Campaign

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About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.

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