The New Yorker interviews Nate Cohn on the polling mishaps in the 2020 election.

His biggest surprise: “The Hispanic vote. The swing towards Trump in Hispanic areas across the country is extraordinary. It was hinted at in the pre-election polls. The polls always showed the President faring better among nonwhite, and particularly Hispanic, voters than he did four years ago, but the magnitude of the shift was way beyond expectations. We learned that early in the night in Miami-Dade County, where no one had the President doing as well as he did. And it has proven true, as far as I can tell, basically everywhere in the country among Latino voters, to varying degrees. It’s true down-ballot. It’s not like this was just about the President. And I think it’s a huge and important political story.”

“And the second thing that really surprised me is the white, rural, Midwestern vote. The pre-election polls said that Joe Biden was doing much better than Hillary Clinton was four years ago among white voters without a degree. And those gains simply did not materialize. The results looked quite a bit like 2016 across most of rural America, and there were many areas where Donald Trump did better in white working-class areas than he did in 2016.”

Nate Cohn: “This morning, a big wave of polls showed Joe Biden with a clear lead. Nearly all of these were sponsored by major media organizations and conducted via live phone interviews. If you want to check out what we had to say about them, you can scroll down a bit farther on the page. TLDR: Biden’s still ahead by a lot.”

“This afternoon, we got a big wave of polls showing a very similar result, but by very different means. Nearly all were conducted online or by automated phone calls. Emerson, Ipsos, YouGov (here as part of the Cooperative Election Study) and SurveyMonkey are all fairly familiar pollsters with this approach…”

“I don’t want to get into the ins and outs of which methods might be best. What’s important: Mr. Biden seems to hold a significant lead, no matter the methodology.”

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News study has found no evidence, so far, of the kind of late surge toward President Trump among undecided voters that helped produce his unexpected wins in 2016.

When pollsters asked themselves how so many missed signs that Trump would win the 2016 election, one factor they identified was a late swing toward him in the last days of the campaign.

“The one thing most likely to conjure nightmares of the 2016 election night for opponents of Donald Trump is the Needle,” the AP reports.

“A graphic on The New York Times’ website, the Needle measured in real time the probability of victory for Trump or Hillary Clinton as votes were counted. Its steady movement triggered anxiety for Clinton supporters, who repeatedly refreshed the page, and elation for Trump fans.”

“The Needle won’t be making a reappearance on Nov. 3, one change in the world of election probability gurus following the unexpected 2016 result.”

Also curious: “Nate Silver’s influential FiveThirtyEight blog used a number, not a needle, for the same task four years ago but won’t on election night 2020.”

Nate Cohn: “For the first time since we started our poll tracker several weeks ago, Joe Biden leads by enough to withstand a repeat of the polling error in 2016.”

“If the polls were exactly as wrong as they were four years ago, Mr. Biden would hold the Clinton states and flip Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nebraska’s Second District, giving him more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win.”

“Of course, the polls won’t be exactly as wrong as they were in 2016. They could understate support for Donald Trump by an even greater degree. But there are good reasons to believe that many causes of 2016’s poll misfire are less likely this time around.”

A new Morning Consult survey finds little basis for the theory that there are “shy” Trump voters who don’t tell pollsters the truth about who they will support.

The Upshot has an interesting twist on polling averages, showing the key battleground states along with what would happen with a polling error similar to those in 2016 or 2012.

But Jonathan Bernstein has two caveats: “One is that the chart assumes any error would be in the same direction, which it may not be; I’d rather they demonstrated the size of the error, which could favor either candidate. The other thing is that the ‘polling error’ here includes the final three weeks of polls in each of those previous elections, but there’s good reason to believe that the race shifted in Donald Trump’s direction in the final days in 2016, so part of what’s being called an error here is really polls taken before voters changed their minds.”

Harry Enten: “Let’s state it up front: winning the popular vote means nothing in and of itself. You only become president if you win the Electoral College.”

“That said, the national polling matters a lot. We have a ton of it, unlike in a number of swing states. It’s more accurate than the state polling on average. Most importantly, we have a fairly good idea of what Biden’s margin needs to be nationally in order to win in the Electoral College.”

Key takeaway: “If Biden wins by more than 5 points nationally, he’s almost certainly going to win enough electoral votes to get to at least 270 and take the Electoral College. There’s simply little record of a difference between the margin in the key swing states and the national vote being greater than 5 points.”

“If Biden wins by somewhere between 3 and 5 points nationally, he’ll be the clear favorite in the Electoral College, even if there is some non-negligible chance Trump could emerge victorious.”