State polls suggest that Biden has a clear national advantage

By
Rex Rose
Biden's advantage is the most stable ever

What’s the point: One of the big questions when looking at national polls is whether or not they are an accurate representation of what is happening at the state level. One of the easiest ways to verify is compare the results of the state survey to the presidential vote passed in a given state. I’ve done it for all the phone polls that have called cell phones since early April.
When we do an average these state polls, suggest that Biden runs with about 6 points ahead of Hillary Clinton.

In other words, state-level polls suggest that Biden has a national advantage of around 8 points.

This is actually a little larger than 6.6 Biden points in the national high quality polling average taken in the same period. I should note that if we weight the average of the state surveys on the population of each state, we get a margin just north of that point of 6.6 points. (Population weighting makes us a little more susceptible to anomalous polls, as we have fewer polls from more populated states.)

Furthermore, all methods agree that Biden has a fairly considerable national advantage.

Examining state polls has the advantage of having many more data points to play with, so I feel pretty confident that they are giving us a decent snapshot. We are reviewing over 20 surveys and over 15,000 interviews. The aggregate margin of error is small.

Furthermore, we can examine the states that we expect to be at least somewhat competitive (i.e. those where the margin was last within 10 points) and those that we don’t think will be close in 2020.

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In competitive states (where most of the state survey was conducted), there was an average swing of 6 points towards Biden compared to Clinton’s 2016 result. The same is true in non-competitive states.

At least from these state level data, it does not appear that neither candidate is increasing the score disproportionately in areas that were already friendly to him.

Biden has posted leads of over 5 points in places like Michigan is Pennsylvania. He is ahead in more than enough states to get 270 electoral votes if the elections had taken place today.

We can also test our data to see what would happen if the polls underestimated Trump as they did in 2016.

What I found out is that Biden would still be ahead, even with a 2016 mishap.

Polls have underestimated Trump by 1 point (RealClearPolitics) or 2 points (FiveThirtyEight) in the set of states we are currently polling from. By applying that bias for 2016 to our current data, Biden would have a 6 to 7 point advantage nationwide.

Focusing only on competitive states, polls have declared Trump by 2 points (RealClearPolitics) or 3 points (FiveThirtyEight). If polls in competitive states were out of what they were in 2016, Biden would still be ahead in states like Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Of course, it may not be wise to expect an era of the 2016 elections in 2020. Polls in these states that had major contests across the state in 2018 were practically impartial. It does not matter which series of states (all or only competitive) and as an aggregatepolls were no more favorable to Republicans than the final result.
In a state like Wisconsin, the Marquette 2018 final survey the final Senate margin was nailed and the Democratic candidate for the governor’s margin undervalued by 1 point.

The bottom line is Biden ahead right now nationally and in competitive states. The good news for Trump is that he has about six months to change the course of the campaign, which is more than enough to do it.

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