Although polling averages gave Clinton the edge over Trump in 2016 there are significant differences in the evidence today

After the dust has settled on the election, there will be plenty of time to analyze whether the state-level polling delivered a better picture of the race this year than it did in 2016, political organizers say.

But one thing is certain: the polls at the end of the 2020 presidential race are telling a very different story from the polls at the end of the 2016 race, and it’s a rosier picture for Biden than it was for Clinton.

An unchanging polling graphic has emerged in this presidential race: two lines, a blue one above and a red one below, running in parallel, separated by 8 points or so, for the entire year.

Those lines represent the national polling averages over time of a head-to-head match-up between Biden and Donald Trump, and they have never intersected.

In the last presidential election, between Trump and Hillary Clinton, the polling averages intersected every couple of months, weaving their way towards an endpoint that depicted Clinton ahead by three points. She won the popular vote by two points.

The averages this time have Biden up by 7.5 points (Real Clear Politics), 9 points (New York Times/Upshot) and 9 points (FiveThirtyEight) – depicting a lead that is two or three times larger than that depicted for Clinton.

The White House is not won through a popular vote, of course. But opening up a large national lead is impossible without opening up state-level leads. And the state-level polls in 2020 also depict larger leads for Biden in key battlegrounds than they did for Clinton – with some important caveats.

We can focus on three states Trump narrowly won in 2016 – Wisconsin (Trump +0.7), Michigan (Trump +0.3) and Pennsylvania (Trump +0.7) – and compare the work, then and now, of three influential outlets: FiveThirtyEight, an elections forecaster; Real Clear Politics, a polling aggregator; and the New York Times’ Upshot, a forecaster-pollster-aggregator.

The Upshot produced an insightful product for 2020 that delivers a polling average – and then delivers the same average “if the polls were as wrong as they were in 2016”. The tool currently depicts Biden with a lead in Wisconsin of 10 points, or 4 points if the polls were equally wrong; in Michigan of 8 points, or 4 points; and in Pennsylvania of 6 points, or 1 point.

The upshot: even if the polls were as wrong as they were in 2016 – which was very wrong indeed – Biden still would look to be ahead in the three key states that Trump won that year.

FiveThirtyEight projects vote share – meaning the margin between the candidates on election day. In each of the three states, the site’s projections are significantly better for Biden than they were for Clinton. In Wisconsin the number has moved from 5.3 points four years ago to 8 points, in Michigan from 4.2 points to 8.1 points, and in Pennsylvania from 3.7 points to 5.1 points.

Real Clear Politics averages polling results. Here, too, the estimated sizes of the Democratic candidate’s leads have changed since 2016, in Wisconsin from 6.5 points to 6.4 points; in Michigan from 3.4 points to 8.2 points; and in Pennsylvania from 1.9 points to 3.5 points.

The Wisconsin number, in which Biden’s lead in the polling averages is depicted as a fraction smaller than what we read about Clinton, is one of the aforementioned caveats – exceptions in the data to the narrative that Biden’s lead is significantly larger than Clinton’s across the board.

Such exceptions point up the fact that Trump continues to have a path to victory, reliant on an extraordinary turnout by his base of voters.