Can Trump Repeat His 2016 Win in PA? Who Votes Is Key. | RealClearPolitics
While Biden consistently leads President Trump in the polls in Pennsylvania — the RealClearPolitics polling average shows him up 6.3 percentage points — Clinton had a similar advantage a month from Election Day four years ago. In 2016, FiveThirtyEight s Election Day model estimated her chances of winning the Keystone State at 77%.
Understandably, this track record gives Trump supporters solace, even as Biden s backers are confident the race is heading their way. The Biden camp also believes their voter demographics are going to look much different than Clinton s and even different from those showing up at Biden s rallies.
Yet academics and strategists on both sides of the aisle are unsure if a repeat of 2016 is in store. The underlying questions are whether pollsters are biased and if we have entered an era, at least with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket, when the norms of data collection are upended by a lack of understanding who is going to vote. In pollsters language, the problem is simple: Are they sampling the right voters?
Youngstown State University political science professor Paul Sracic is among those wondering if the models are accurate. Four years ago, he was convinced by the polling data that Trump would lose. Yet he couldn t shake the anecdotal evidence he saw in the Steel Valley region and the nagging feeling that something different was happening in the famed Democratic Blue Wall of Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. His instincts proved to be more accurate than the polls.