In early 2017, just days before Donald Trump was set to be inaugurated, I asked the Trump campaign team if it was as shocked by the win as the rest of the country. “Our internal numbers showed we were winning,” Brad Parscale, then the campaign’s digital director, told me at the time. “We thought the other polls were right and our polls were wrong. It turned out it was the other way around.”
Four years later it appears the same discrepancy is at play. According to almost every publicly available source, Joe Biden is poised to win—either narrowly or decisively. Today FiveThirtyEight gives Biden about a 90% chance of victory, with Trump at 10%. In battleground states Biden is favored in almost every poll, with some going as far as to suggest that he will take Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. But according to two people familiar with Trump’s internal polling, numbers that are often kept highly secret, the president and his data team are once again seeing something very different: Team Trump has several models that show the president repeating his 2016 win, losing the popular vote by a huge margin, but winning the Electoral College by a slim-yet-definitive number. And this, of course, has some Democratic pollsters worried.
“In every election I’ve been part of, I’ve never seen this much anxiety about an outcome and instability about the numbers, with everyone asking, ‘Are the numbers correct? Is this 2016 all over again? Could it be worse than 2016 this time?’” a Democratic strategist told me when I asked about Trump’s internal numbers. As the strategist explained, people have reason to worry. Databases like Rasmussen have Biden up by one point nationally, and the IBD/TIPP presidential poll, one of the two that were correct in 2016, has him up by three. “When you look at the top battleground states, the margin of error is 2.9, and here’s the problem with that: Trump outperformed the polls by an average of 2.8 in 2016,” the strategist explained. So while some pollsters predict Biden could take Wisconsin by 17 points, in reality, some states could come down to just a couple thousand votes.
The problem with current predictions is that they’re largely disparate, no matter where you look. For example, according to the Trafalgar Group, the only other polling firm that called Trump as the victor in 2016, the president will win almost every battleground state and then some, for a total of 322 Electoral College votes. On the other side, Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics is predicting almost the opposite, with Biden winning 321 Electoral College votes.
Nationally, there’s no question that Biden will win in a landslide. But in America presidents aren’t decided by national politics; they’re decided by a handful of states that tend to teeter in one direction or another. According to the database TargetEarly, a dashboard for exploring early in-person and absentee voting trends, Biden is clearly ahead in national polls, with 41 million Democrats having voted already, compared to only 36 million Republicans. However, in the battleground states, the numbers are drastically different. There, collectively, Republicans lead in early voting by a difference of around 139,000 votes. Then there are the “unaffiliated” voters who’ve cast their ballots—about 5 million people in battleground states. While Democrats believe these voters will trend toward Biden, according to IBD’s latest numbers, Trump has a “slight edge” among independent voters.
In other words, Biden’s early-voting lead in these critical states is much tighter than it is nationally. And these states are the ones that will decide the election. When I asked the Democratic pollster what that means for the Democrats, he simply said: “Make sure you have your favorite beverage or narcotic nearby, because you may need it.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— Progressives Are Going Rogue to Flip Pennsylvania for Biden
— White House Reporters Fume Over Team Trump’s “Reckless” COVID Response
— Why Anti–Trump Attack Ads Might Actually Be Helping Him
— Tax Mess Aside, Can Trump Pay Off His $1 Billion in Debt?
— News Media Begins to Contemplate a Post–Trump White House
— The Kimberly Guilfoyle Sexual Harassment Allegations Get Even Darker
— As Trump Falters, Democrats See an Expanding 2020 Senate Map
— From the Archive: Inside Trump’s Twisted, Epic Battle for Mar-a-Lago
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.