With just over a week to go before Election Day, everyone is freaking out under an avalanche of polling. Most polls show Joe Biden with a substantial advantage nationally and a comfortable lead in key swing states. But of course Donald Trump’s campaign and its supporters are defiant. They insist: “Well, that’s what everyone said in 2016.” Meanwhile, the Biden campaign and its supporters are nervous. They, too, caution: “Well, that’s what everyone said in 2016.”
In many ways 2020 is haunted by 2016. So in an effort to tune into a clear, crisp radio signal through all the white noise, I interviewed the ultimate expert: Dave Wasserman. He’s one of the very few political seers who predicted—in mid-September of 2016, no less—that Trump might very well lose the popular vote and yet win the electoral college.
Wasserman covers congressional races for the nonpartisan and widely respected Cook Political Report. He has a microscopic understanding of what is happening around the country politically. And I sat down with him for Sunday night’s episode of Showtime’s The Circus, a weekly assessment of the campaign shitshow. Some of our conversation appeared on air; some was left on the cutting-room floor.
After talking with him I came away with the sense that Trump is not just toast, but burnt toast. To use a poker metaphor: In the last election, Trump won by pulling an inside straight to win. This time he’ll need nothing short of a royal flush—by pulling an ace from his sleeve.
Wasserman’s prognostications, of course, have to be weighed against opposing viewpoints. This weekend The Hill, for instance, pointed out five ways that Trump could actually pull off another historic upset: The president could benefit from a better ground game than Biden’s; there may be legions of “shy” Trump voters who’d rather not tell pollsters their intentions; Trump may gain from shifts in Black-voter turnout; the Latino vote is a wild card, especially in delegate-rich Florida; and GOP registration has surpassed its Democratic counterpart in some key states. (Unmentioned here are other pesky wild cards, such as ballot box hanky-panky by nefarious forces, foreign or domestic; unseen events that erode public confidence in the election itself; and eleventh hour court cases that could delay a timely outcome.)
Wasserman, however, is sort of the acknowledged electoral clairvoyant. So I asked him to help identify the bumps and byways on the road map to November 3. What makes this pandemic-era election so special? How should we interpret strong Republican-registration numbers? And what does massive early voting mean?
Vanity Fair: So how is 2020 different than 2016?
Dave Wasserman: There are a couple of important differences. First of all, at the district level, the polling that we’re seeing is pretty consistent; it’s in line with the national polls that suggest that Donald Trump is underperforming his 2016 margins [by] anywhere from 8 to 10 points, with few exceptions. Now, there are a couple of exceptions: One is in really heavily Hispanic districts. [These] are places where Donald Trump is approaching or even exceeding his 2016 performance. But we also are seeing in really wealthy suburbs or highly white-collar, professional suburbs—even in traditionally conservative metro areas—that Joe Biden is doing 10 or more points better than Hillary Clinton did.
And you know, it’s astonishing. Collin County, Texas, voted for Mitt Romney by 30 points [in 2012]. It’s one of the most professional, white-collar suburbs of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. It has attracted scores of corporate relocations in recent years. We’re seeing district-level polls that suggest Joe Biden could carry that county in 2020.
So you say that Trump is underperforming [when compared to his 2016 turnout], and he doesn’t have a lot of margin for error, given that he won by 77,000 votes in three counties in three states. But according to RealClearPolitics polling averages, looking at key states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and North Carolina, on this date in 2016, Hillary Clinton was outperforming Biden in all those states. How does that square?
There are two other very important differences between four years ago and now. The first is that Biden has had a much more stable lead than Hillary Clinton had. You know, if you go back to the poll chart in 2016, it looks like an EKG; it was jumping around all over the place. Every time Donald Trump stepped in it, his vote share went way down. Every time the spotlight was back on Hillary Clinton and her emails, the race tightened back up. This time around Joe Biden has never been behind; he’s had a fairly stable lead that’s ebbed around the margins.
But in October his lead has actually gone up as President Trump’s handling of COVID—and his own illness—has come under skepticism from seniors. And we’ve seen the 65-plus vote, in particular, blow wide open. Joe Biden had been ahead by five among seniors for much of the year. Now his lead is more like nine. Keep in mind, Donald Trump carried seniors by five in 2016.