Trump Has the Early Edge Over Biden

Primary season is wrapping up – regardless of whether Nikki Haley admits it or not – and we are now hurtling toward the general election. With the Supreme Court ruling Monday that only Congress may disqualify a candidate for federal office on the grounds that she or he engaged in “insurrection” against the federal government, the two candidates will likely be President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

It's worthwhile, then, to pause and take a “big picture” look at the current polling. When we do, we see that the polls tell a remarkably consistent, coherent story. Let’s start with the national polls. Trump currently leads by 2.1 percentage points in the RCP Average. Biden has only led in seven samples all year. And remember, it’s unusual for Trump to underperform his polls.

Where things get interesting is that this is the exact same story that the state-level polls are telling us. Remember, state pollsters are often very different entities than national pollsters, so if they are telling the same story, we can probably have a heightened degree of certainty that the result we see is accurate.

A good way to think about this is Cook PVI. Cook PVI tells us more or less how much more Republican or Democratic a state is relative to the country as a whole. So a state that is R+1 is a state that is one percentage point more Republican than the country. In a situation where the Republican is winning 47% of the vote nationally, we would expect that candidate to receive 48% in an R+1 state. Note that when we talk about the spread we double the PVI: the candidate losing by 6 nationally would be losing by 4 in the R+1 state.

So what do we see in the states? Let’s start with the “R+6” states: Iowa and Ohio. With Trump winning by two nationally we’d expect him to be up by about 14 in those states. Although it’s not that large, it’s a comfortable lead: Trump is up by 10 in Ohio and a similar margin in Iowa. In R+5 Texas we’d expect him to be up by 12; he leads by eight, possibly because that state is swiftly swinging leftward.

There are three R+3 states: Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. Based on national polling, we’d expect him to be leading by about eight points. He’s up by about that in Florida, by seven in Georgia, and by six in North Carolina.

Trump does seem to be trailing expectations in the R+2 states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. We’d expect him to be up by about six points in those states. He is up by 5.5 points in Arizona, but by just 1 in Wisconsin and is actually down by a point in our average in Pennsylvania (though he’s up six in the most recent Pennsylvania poll and four in our most recent Wisconsin poll).

Nevada and Michigan are R+1. We’d expect him to be up by four if he were up by two nationally. He’s up by four in Michigan and eight in Nevada.

Polling in the Democratic-leaning states is sparse, but Biden is up just three points in Minnesota; he’s up by a much wider margin in New Hampshire, both of which lean Democratic by a point. He’s up four in D+3 Virginia (we’d expect Biden to be up four there if Trump were up by two nationally); Maine and New Mexico haven’t been polled recently. We’d expect Biden to be up six in D+4 Colorado; that’s what polls show.

What emerges here is a stable, consistent picture. The polls show Donald Trump with a narrow but stable lead. The swing states, in turn, show more or less what we’d expect to see if Trump were up by two nationally, though there are regional variations (and sampling error can be more of a consideration there, since there are fewer polls). So yes, Trump really does seem to have the edge early on. And it is early, although it won’t be early much longer.