People need to just stop.
Trump is not and has never been behind.
I hear you. I think Trump wins in the end. I’m just trying to make sense of the polls as they come out. I try to look at all the poll internals and identify the mistaken and/or biased assumptions of the pollsters and adjust them to make some sense out of them. Take the Fox News poll that came out over the weekend showing Biden up 9 in Arizona for instance. A ridiculous poll result from my perspective. Here’s my explanation:
Fox News assumed a voter turnout of D+3, or 46D/11I/43R. The 2016 exit polls showed it was R+4, a seven-point swing. Pollsters, including Fox, are assuming massive Democratic turnout.
The D+3 sample badly oversamples Democrats. Will adjust to R+4, or 42D/11I/46R. According to the poll data, Biden won D’s 92-3, I’s 29-19 and Trump won R’s 85-8. Applying these voter ratios to the much more likely 42D/11I/46R voter turnout, Biden receives 45.5 to Trump 42.5.
I think their likely voter screen is also letting a lot people in who won’t vote, which bumps Biden’s number up, but that’s hard to correct for. I put the number they report in a pollster average and the number I came to in my average, and go with that.
I’m doing this with every poll that comes out. I figure if these polls go unchallenged and unexplained, that’s going to lead some astray. As for Trump not being behind, I don’t view this map as him being behind. The Democrats have a few states that give them a lot of electoral votes. Any Democrat starts with 199 electoral votes, maybe even 212 with the way Northern Virginia has taken over the state.