I think people don’t believe the polls anymore. There have been too many unexplained “misses”. It’s not even specific to the United States.
Furthermore people understand that being ahead in the polls doesn’t win you an election by itself. You have to win the Electoral College. Winning a supermajority in California does not help you if you lose several states by a few thousand votes each. We saw the in 2000 (although it’s entirely possible that Flordia really voted Democratic) and we saw that in 2016.
In the last Canadian election, the Conservatives won the popular vote by 1-2% percent, but it was so heavily concentrated in Alberta and Saskatchewan that they did not win the majority of seats. Let’s pretend these seats are all the same size, even though they are not.
I think any reasonable analysis of the 2020 election will say that it’s close. Trump is behind in a lot of swing states by only a few points, and the numbers tighten, then drift apart, then tighten again.
After 3 1/2 years of chaos, many people soured on The Donald. Everyone had an opinion of him pre-pandemic, and those opinions are pretty well baked in. I don’t think he had a cakewalk pre-pandemic, he could have well lost even with no covid. The talking heads keep saying the race will tighten. I don’t think so. I think the numbers are pretty well set, barring a massive debate debacle.
Cruising, no. Likely to win, pre-COVID-19, as an incumbent President with an economy widely seen to be humming along and a structural GOP advantage in the Electoral College, alas, yes.
I’m guessing that Trump is the least popular president since we began gathering reliable public opinion data, so I agree that he was never cruising to victory. His brand of politics made it risky to become a normal president. He won by playing to a political base that is psychologically warped – yes, deplorable. There, I said it.
He was never going to win reelection by winning the popular vote, so it was never his strategy to become more popular across the population; he wanted to be more popular within his base so that he could maximize their participation, perhaps bringing along a few suckers from somewhere else along the way.
But now the state of the union is bad enough that even some who supported him with fear or fuss a few years ago, are now in fact fearful and fussy. So the base strategy is in danger of causing him to tank in this election.
Even so, my current projections still only have Biden having 290 delegates in the bag, and there’s always a chance that the bag might leak between now and then.
Even if you don’t think the pandemic has sunk Trump’s chances, that still means you don’t agree with the (extremely common) narrative that he was in the catbird’s seat in January but has lost significant ground due to the pandemic and associated economic fallout. There’s just no evidence for that. All the polling shows him to be in almost exactly the same position he was eight months ago.
Though, his poll numbers have always been crappy, I still would have given Trump a slightly better than even chance of winning pre-pandemic, namely because no one really seemed to be all that thrilled about Biden.
Also the left in this country has a really bad habit of forming circular firing squads at the drop of a hat, a huge disadvantage when going up against an army that will enthusiastically fight tooth and nail for their leader. Without Trump’s shitty response to the pandemic and the BLM protests serving as a unifying factor, people in the Democratic coalition would constantly have been at each other’s throats this year.
And with the economy humming along at a nice clip, Trump may even have been able to win over a few people who held their noses and voted for Hillary in 2016.
If, like Trump, you have unwisely decided the stock market is the biggest indicator of a president’s performance, then yes, he was cruising to re-election before the pandemic, and he can still pull out a win if it recovers. That’s what people mean.
Nobody with any brains pays any attention to polling in January. It’s like forecasting a hurricane’s landfall 10 months before it forms.
We can hope that Democrats have learned that attacking an incompetent president’s expected stock market performance is an embarrassingly stupid idea.