With less than a month to go until election day, both President Trump and former Vice President Biden are campaigning to see who will fill the Oval Office for the next four years. From the moment the two earned their party's nomination, public opinion polling has shown Biden leading President Trump both nationally and in most swing states. The RealClearPolitics (RCP) average of national polls currently has Biden with a 9.2 point lead, similar national polling aggregators FiveThirtyEight and CNN show Biden with an 8.4 point lead and 11 point lead, respectively.
With that said, it's important for voters to recall some of the disasters in public polling from the 2016 race when then-candidate Donald Trump pulled off perhaps the greatest electoral surprise in American history, winning the electoral college 304 to 227.
Looking at just the polling data alone in this year's presidential election, you could swap out "Biden" with "Clinton" and you would see a very similar race to 2016. In fact, a recent CNN poll shows the former Vice President up 16 points on President Trump nationally. Interestingly enough, CNN released a similar poll at around the same time 2016 showing Hillary Clinton up on Donald Trump by 12 points -- and we all know who won in 2016. The stunning collapse of the public polling industry in 2016, and the confidence in which they projected Clinton's inevitable win, leave voters this year skeptical of the same prognosticators and pundits who failed to call the 2016 election correctly.
Voter registration data can inform us on existing trends in the swing states that will likely determine the election. It's one thing to answer a poll on the phone, or online, and simply state your intentions to vote -- it's another thing to see how voters are actually behaving.
Among the most coveted swing states this year are Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Each of these states report partisan registration data. A recent article from CBS News took a closer look at voter registration trends since 2016 and shows some interesting numbers. What does the voter registration data in these key swing states tell us? Click over to FRC Action to find out...
Also, exactly how important is turnout? Expert pollster Scott Rasmussen joined Tony Perkins on "Washington Watch" Wednesday to go through some of the latest Election Day forecasts. "I'm releasing new battleground state polls every day on PoliticalIQ.com. In Florida and in North Carolina, two absolutely must-win states for the president, he's down by two points right now, but I'm releasing different turnout models, because we're never quite sure exactly who's going to show up in the midst of this pandemic. With the strong turnout model in both those states, the president comes out on top. And this is a reminder, the election is not over yet."
