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.”

Nate Silver says national polling trends are more important than the lead itself.

“In other words, I don’t really care if Biden us up 8 nationally or whatever. I care about the numbers in Wisconsin, Florida, etc. But if Biden has gained 2 points in national polls, it’s likely that he’s also gained roughly 2 points in Wisconsin and  Florida since they were last polled.”

“In theory, you can also impute these trends from state polls (i.e. if Biden is gaining in Michigan, he’s probably gaining in Wisconsin) and our model does do that too. But national polls give you a high volume of polls from a relatively constant set of pollsters—making trend detection easier.”

Politico: “Pollsters aren’t deliberately skewing their surveys against the president and his party, as Trump’s orbit alleges. The national polls showing Trump trailing Biden by an increasing margin aren’t ‘phony’ or rigged.”

“But some pollsters, especially the relatively few who conduct surveys in battleground states, are still grappling with the same problems that plagued those polls four years ago. In fact, most pollsters believe that, on balance, state polls are overstating the scale of Biden’s advantage.”

“That was precisely the problem in 2016: The national polls were largely accurate, to within the margin of error. But there were too few state polls, and many of those that were conducted failed to collect accurate data, especially from white voters without college degrees in key swing states.”

President Trump’s campaign is demanding CNN retract and apologize for a recent poll that showed him well behind Joe Biden, CNN reports.

The demand, coming in the form of a cease and desist letter to CNN President Jeff Zucker, was immediately rejected by the network.

After a new CNN poll came out showing Donald Trump trailing Joe Biden by 14 percentage points, the president announced he has retained Republican pollster John McLaughlin to write a memo denouncing the poll.

However, Jonathan Chait points out McLaughlin is “a laughingstock within the profession.”

“McLaughlin is notorious for producing rosy polling data on behalf of his clients. (Or, at least, purportedly on behalf of his clients, who often find themselves unpleasantly surprised on election night.) A lengthy stream of overly optimistic polls culminated in McLaughlin convincing his client, Eric Cantor, that he was leading primary challenger David Brat by 34 points in 2014. Cantor lost by 11, at which point leading Republicans began begging their party not to hire him.”

McLaughlin has a FiveThirtyEight pollster rating of C/D and is one of the lowest-rated polls in their database.