We have the first high quality live caller poll in a while from Ann Selzer, a national poll with Democrats +8 (49%-41%) done right after the Republican national convention ended, which should put all discussions of a tightening on ice for a while. The poll, a Likely Voter screen poll with a whiter electorate in 2020 than 2016, shows Joe Biden firmly ahead, and without any crosstab based landmines on his way to winning the White House.
Let’s start with the race data, where Joe Biden is only losing whites by 3% on route to this D+8 result. It is the second poll this week to show this kind of white support, and unlike AtlasIntel, they don’t have Trump winning 29% of Blacks and 41% of Hispanics. For Democrats worried about the fact that there is 10% not going to either Biden or Trump, fret not: 7% of whites are not voting for either major party candidate, whereas 13% of non-whites are, meaning that any expected split of undecideds should break to Biden, and any notion of a shy Trump voter should be tossed out the window.
Dig into the possible sources of polling error, and it doesn’t exist. Some pollsters are getting samples that are more diverse since 2016, and run some risk of getting a sample low on non-degree whites – but here, only 25% of the sample is non-white, as opposed to 26% in 2016. They’re not missing white voters, and their education splits for white voters (after some analysis, given what was released in the press release didn’t explicitly say it) looks quite like what the NYT/Siena had the last time they polled. And, for any claim that may arise, this poll was low on Biden in March – they only had a 4% lead when others flirted with the high single digits.
Suffolk is also out with a national poll, D+7 (50%-43%) – and both pollsters polled right after the RNC. The chances are that these numbers are artificially good for Trump, if anything, and given he’s losing badly, that’s a horrible sign for him. Could he come back? I mean, I guess anything is possible, but he is running out of time and of potential reasons he would come back. It was supposed to be the Conventions, but at this point he either got a convention bump – which means this D+8 is really a D+10 with the bump taken out – or he never got one at all, which would mean that even four nights of free airtime can’t save him. I’m not sure if either is preferable for the President, but both are horrible for him.
Nothing as of right now suggests that the result of the November election will be anything but a blowout for the former Vice President. Trump needs to shake up this race to get rid of that fundamental truth. His convention failed to do it, his law and order attacks have failed to do it, and he has lost five and a half months now in his quest to turn this ship around. Refusing to live in that reality isn’t smart punditry, it is denial of facts, and as day follows night, Donald Trump is on track to be the first one-term President of my life. After all, he’s running out of time to stop it.
. They have to be proactive in certain states but still.