We're not quite at the two minute warning yet, but let's just say it's on the horizon. Biden still leads comfortably by 9 percentage points nationally and by 4.4 points in the battleground states. Both are up considerably from where they were a week ago.
The reason for this is, no doubt, due in large part to Trump's abysmal performance in last week's debate, which as I correctly observed looked more like a wrestling match than a debate. Trump didn't even try to persuade undecided voters and the results showed. But the rest comes down to good old-fashioned Karma. The man who spent the last eight months down-playing the worst pandemic to hit America in over a century himself contracted Covid-19 and had to be hospitalized at Walter Reed for three days. Now that's what I call a comeuppance. Some things you just can't bully.
The fact is a majority of people in this country are now seeing the wheels come off this administration and no amount of spin is going to put those wheels back on. Trump's deranged, unhinged video that he made on his return to the White House revealed a man who is detached from reality and completely devoid of any empathy. Voters aren't stupid; most of them saw what was going on and the polling reflects it.
But before we get ahead of ourselves and start ordering the champaign, a few things need to be clarified. First, we should beware of outlier polls that show Biden with double-digit leads. Jonathan Last of The Bulwark has a great piece on this that should be required reading for all of us. In it he casts doubt on the accuracy of recent polls by CNN and NBC which show Biden ahead by 16 and 14 points respectively. If true, these polls suggest that Biden is on the verge of an epic landslide win comparable to the one Reagan had over Mondale in '84. And no one who's spent even a couple of minutes observing the polarized political landscape of this country would ever reach such an outlandish conclusion.
Two excellent examples of these outlier polls come courtesy of the ABC/Washington Post, which last month showed Trump ahead by four points in Florida and Biden ahead by 16 points in Minnesota. While I can't say definitively what will happen in Florida, I can assure you that the only way Biden wins Minnesota by 16 points is if the DNC kidnaps half the registered Republicans in the state. If Biden does win Minnesota, and I think he will, he will most likely do so by 3 to 5 points. That's why it's important, as Last points out, to look at the polling average and not individual polls, which is what statisticians like Nate Silver have been doing for well over a decade.
The second thing that I think we need to be cognizant of is that while Biden's poll numbers have improved of late, he's still not home free. Can we be honest for a moment? Neither his debate or his town hall performance were all that exhilarating. Granted, in the former, I'm not sure what else he could've done to overcome the tactics Trump employed. As I mentioned above, Trump wasn't trying to win; he was trying to rattle Biden. And while he mostly failed in that endeavor, except maybe for a couple of instances, he did succeed in preventing Biden from laying out his vision for the country. In the town hall debate, in front of an audience that was mostly in his corner, he was less than riveting. I give him a B minus for the former and a B for the latter.
Let's face it: against a stronger opponent, Biden would most likely be tied or perhaps even slightly behind. The thing that is saving his bacon so far is that a majority of the electorate has decided that this election is a referendum on Trump. Should that perception change even in the slightest, we have a whole new ballgame.
And lastly, there's still no way of determining how many mail-in ballots will be tossed out because of errors. If initial reports out of North Carolina are any indication, we could be looking at as many as 2 percent of all Democratic ballots that won't be counted this November. And that's way too many. Consider that in Florida and North Carolina, where Biden enjoys a modest lead, 2 percent could mean the difference between winning and losing both states.
Bottom line is this: we still don't know if the polling out of Michigan and Wisconsin is accurate. Even if Biden wins his birth state of Pennsylvania, he will need at least two more swing states in order to win the electoral college. Having multiple paths to 270 electoral votes only counts if the paths are viable. And as we learned all too painfully in 2016, the multiple paths we assumed Hillary had, in the end were reduced to a single cobblestone road that led to a dead end.
Biden can't afford to let that happen again.
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