“Under no scenario will Donald Trump be declared a victor on Election Night.”
— Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, quoted by Axios.
“Under no scenario will Donald Trump be declared a victor on Election Night.”
— Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, quoted by Axios.
ProPublica reports the poll-watching “army” that President Trump has tried to rally hasn’t materialized.
“Although there’s no official data, election officials across the country say that they have seen relatively few Republican poll watchers during early voting, and that at times Democratic poll watchers have outnumbered the GOP’s. In Colorado and Nevada, where the Trump campaign was particularly active in recruiting poll watchers, its efforts largely petered out.”
Jonathan Bernstein: “It’s worth keeping in mind that Trump’s bluster is generally worse than his follow-up, and that the biggest danger in what he says is often the reaction (or overreaction) that it causes.”
From Quinnipiac University:
From NBC News/Marist:
From Data Orbital:
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The final USC Dornsife Daybreak Poll finds Joe Biden leading Donald Trump in the presidential race nationally, 53% to 43%.
The poll confirms that the presidential race “has remained stable — despite the chaotic backdrop of an election season coinciding with a global pandemic, racial unrest, continued economic uncertainty, corruption allegations and a president infected with the coronavirus.”
More national polls:
Former Defense secretary Bob Gates fired back at a Wall Street Journal editorial that quoted his memoir, which said Biden has been wrong about “every major foreign policy and national security issue” over the past four decades.
Said Gates in a letter to the editor: “Fairness requires me to note for the record that those comments written in 2014 also noted that Mr. Biden was a man of genuine integrity and character. It is also worth noting that I wrote in these very pages that Donald Trump ‘is stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform. He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.’”
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which has not endorsed a Republican for president since Richard Nixon in 1972, backed Donald Trump’s reelection in an editorial.
James Hohmann: “John Robinson Block, the newspaper’s publisher and former editor-in-chief – who directs the paper’s editorial page – has been photographed on a private plane with Trump and became known nationally for his firing of an anti-Trump cartoonist and writing an editorial that defended Trump’s language toward immigrants.”
“Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) might not be able to vote because he’s in quarantine after close contact with Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-GA), who tested positive for the coronavirus Friday,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.
“Kemp, who tested negative for the virus, has requested an absentee ballot… But an absentee ballot requested Friday is unlikely to arrive in the mail before polls close Tuesday. Georgia law and a court ruling required all absentee ballots to be received by county election officials before 7 p.m. on Election Day.”
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball‘s final Electoral College ratings show Joe Biden at 321 electoral votes and Donald Trump at 217.
Democrats are narrow favorites to capture a Senate majority, 50 to 48 with two Toss-ups — the two Georgia races, both of which we think are likely to go to runoffs.
Democrats will net 10 seats in the House.
Henry Olsen today released his sixth biennial election prediction essay, and what he calls “perhaps the easiest” of them all.
He writes: “Former vice president Joe Biden will win comfortably unless we experience the greatest polling failure in modern history. Democrats will also gain control of the Senate and expand their majority in the House. While not the landslide that some hope for, Democrats will simultaneously control the presidency and both houses of Congress for only the third time since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. That alone is a historic achievement that will give them the upper hand to determine the next stage of our ongoing national crisis.”
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A new GW Politics poll finds Joe Biden leading Donald Trump nationally, 52% to 41%.
Nate Cohn: “President Trump’s surprising victory in 2016 gave him an aura of political invincibility. But he’s in a far bigger predicament now than the one he faced heading into Election Day in 2016. The polls show Joe Biden with a far more significant lead than the one held by Hillary Clinton, and many of the likeliest explanations for the polling misfire do not appear to be in play today.”
“Over at The Upshot, I go into the ways the polls are different today than they were in 2016, and what sort of polling error Mr. Trump would need to win at this point. (A big one.)”
Support for President Trump and Joe Biden in a group of battleground states has remained unchanged in recent days, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, finding little evidence of the kind of last-minute shift toward Mr. Trump that helped him win four years ago.
The poll, conducted on Sunday in 12 states in which the election is most competitive, finds Mr. Biden leading, 51% to 46%, essentially unchanged from a survey late last week.
First Read has important context: Trump won these same states by a combined 2 points in 2016, 49% to 47%.
From Aspiration:
From Public Policy Polling:
From Research & Co.
From Frederick Polls:
For more, see our earlier polling roundup and the latest electoral vote map.
“Twitter provided more details about its policies around tweets that declare election results, and named the seven outlets it will lean on to help it determine whether a race is officially called,” Axios reports.
The list includes ABC News, AP, CNN, CBS News, Decision Desk HQ, Fox News and NBC News — all outlets that experts agree have verified, unbiased decision desks calling elections.
“President Trump has presided over a stock market surge since taking office in 2017, but he’s been outpaced by three of his four predecessors,” Axios reports.
“The S&P 500 grew by 44.5% since Trump’s inauguration through the end of October 2020. This comes up short of former President Obama’s 66.1% through the comparable time period, but well above the -15.8% for former President George W. Bush.”
Taegan 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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