It’s finally official
In any given week, several major polling outlets release new presidential general election numbers. Depending on which way the trend seems to be going, or sometimes simply what sounds like the most ratings-friendly narrative, the media will often latch onto just one of those new polls, while ignoring the others. That’s why today is, statistically speaking, at least, a big deal.
For a couple weeks now we’ve seen individual polls that had Joe Biden up by double digits over Donald Trump. CNN famously had Biden up by 14 points. Then Fox News said Biden was up by 12 points. But we didn’t see much attention given to, for instance, the new Quinnipiac poll, which said Biden was up by just 8 points. It created the perception that Biden was already ahead by double digits in the averages.
But that didn’t officially happen until today, when the New York Times poll placed Joe Biden fourteen points ahead of Trump, thus increasing Biden’s lead in the RealClearPolitics polling averages to 10.2 points. This means that, according to the widely cited RCP model, Biden finally has a double digit lead. Of course there are other polling models that calculate the averages differently, though Biden has a similarly large lead in all of those models as well.
Two truth shine through here. The first is that right now, Joe Biden is the best position possible; his lead is considered massive by presidential general election. The second truth is that there are still four and a half months until the election. Plenty of things can and will change. Trump will try to cheat. The best way to make sure any cheating doesn’t work, is to make sure Biden wins by too large of a lead for any such scale-tipping to matter.
