A lot of folks didn’t see Trump’s victory coming in 2016. Fewer people see where it might come from on November 3
Back then, in my capacity as news editor, I drew a deep breath, took one last, long look at the polls, and recommended we go all in on Trump, because his numbers were within the margin of error in every state he needed to win.
It turned out to be the right call. Trump confounded the pollsters in several key states, where he reversed the normal 3% to 5% margin of error in his favor, winning enough electoral votes to defeat Hillary Clinton.
Can Trump do it again? With three weeks to go before the 2020 election, Trump trails his Democratic challenger Joe Biden by almost 10 points nationally. More importantly, Trump lags Biden by more than the margin of error in seven of ten states classified as “battlegrounds” in the Real Clear Politics Average (RCP) poll, a composite of more than a dozen national polls.
It would be facile to dismiss these polls as “fake news” or “biased.” The same polls in 2016 showed Hillary leading Trump by 3% two days before the election. She won by 2%. You can’t get much closer than that. The mistake pollsters made was more in how they interpreted their numbers, especially in Pennsylvania and Michigan, which Trump flipped to the Republicans.
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