Whether you believe in convention bounces or not, President Donald Trump and the Republicans need one to salvage the elections this fall.
On the current trajectory, former Vice President Joe Biden is likely to win the White House and Democrats are more likely than not to take control of the Senate. And even though the president told The Wall Street Journal that Republicans would take back the House, Democrats are on pace to grow their majority.
Nearly four years later, the 2016 presidential election result looms over any political projection. But Trump’s victory should be a lesson in probability rather than a call to ignore data. We should reject the false choice between following the data and being open-minded about less likely results.
Confidence in the analysis that Democrats are poised to win in November comes from the depth and breadth of the data. Biden not only leads Trump in the national polls, but in most of the individual battleground states that will decide the Electoral College. And Trump continues to struggle to reach his 2016 performance in key congressional districts around the country.
It’s hard to identify any state or district where Trump is performing at least as well as he did four years ago, let alone better. And that’s critical, considering that in 2016 Trump was just the right candidate at just the right time against just the right opponent winning by just enough in just the right states to win.
The president was operating on very slim margins, with a low electoral ceiling and little room for error, before a global pandemic and a national conversation about racism in America, his responses to which are driving his deficit in the polls.
More...