COULD THE POLLS BE WRONG AGAIN?

The polls look good for Joe Biden, but Ari Melber notes that they also looked good for Hillary Clinton at this time in 2016.

As @arimelber explains, even as Trump faces more headwinds than most incumbents, this is still a tight race. While Biden is polled ahead in key battleground states, in most of them he is not yet doing any better than Hillary Clinton did at this very point last cycle.

— The Beat with Ari Melber on MSNBC 📺 (@TheBeatWithAri) October 9, 2020

He's right. Here are the numbers from Real Clear Politics for four key states:

Joshua Holland doesn't buy it.

This is #Stressbait. The crucial missing context is that high-quality pollsters adjusted their weighting after 2016 to include more non-college whites. And Biden, unlike HRC, is over 50% in many surveys. There are also more polls in these states this cycle. https://t.co/bbpEWA2NMU

— Joshua Holland 🔥 (@JoshuaHol) October 9, 2020

But Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics, in an interview with The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner, wonders whether the polling problems in the Midwest have really been solved.

How confident are you that pollsters have fixed the problems we saw in 2016, especially in the Midwest?

I’m still concerned. If you look at 2018, the polling in the Midwest wasn't that great. We were supposed to have a Democratic governor in Ohio. There was supposed to be a Democratic governor in Iowa. There was supposed to be a Democratic senator from Indiana. The Democratic senators in Ohio and Michigan both underperformed the polls....

There’s a possibility that the problem wasn’t, in fact, that pollsters weren’t weighting by college education. That was the big, easy fix. But maybe it was something else. We don’t know what it is....

But Trende offers a very good reason to believe that the polls are right this time:

It seems like the best case for Biden right now is not just that he’s ahead and that there are fewer undecided voters than in 2016 but that he’s been ahead so consistently. It’s not clear that there’s been any point in the race, going back to the beginning of the year, where Trump actually was leading him in enough states to get to two hundred and sixty-nine electoral votes. Is that your sense, too?

I think that is probably the single best argument why we wouldn’t see something like 2016. If you go back to 2016, that race wanted to be a two-point race. It would be close to two points, and then Trump would do something stupid like talk about the judge who couldn’t rule for him because he was “Mexican.” And Clinton would blow up a lead, and then it would tighten back to two points, and then he would insult Khizr Khan and his family, and the lead would blow open. This is different. This is a race where it’s actually been kind of boring. Polls usually have Biden up six, seven points.

He's right. Here's the Real Clear Politics chart of the 2020 race:

And here's the chart of the 2016 race:

Trende says the 2016 race "would be close to two points, and then Trump would do something stupid like talk about the judge who couldn’t rule for him because he was 'Mexican.' And Clinton would blow up a lead, and then it would tighten back to two points, and then he would insult Khizr Khan and his family, and the lead would blow open." To me it looks as if voters kept grasping for reasons not to vote for Hillary Clinton. The 2016 Republican convention was July 18-21 -- and Trump had a lead of 0.9 on July 26. Clinton used the phrase "basket of deplorables" to refer to some Trump voters on September 9 and then announced a pneumonia diagnosis on September 11 -- and her lead narrowed to 0.9 on September 18 and 19. And then, just before the election, there was the reopening of the email investigation. Nate Silver has examined the polling in detail and believes that this could have cost her the election.

I believe it tipped the balance. But she had struggled to hold the lead -- and Biden hasn't had a similar struggle. He has more goodwill with voters.

It's possible that Biden could win the popular vote by a much larger margin than Clinton did while Trump again ekes out victories in enough states to win the Electoral College. But it's not likely. Here are the odds, as calculated by Silver in late September:

As I write this, Silver has Biden with a lead of 10.3. I don't think Biden will hold that lead -- but I think he'll win by at least 3, and that puts him in a safe zone for an Electoral College victory. I hope.