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Yes, Trump Can Still Win

How lightning can strike twice.

Peter Ramirez
5 min readOct 22, 2020
Photo by Mason Kimbarovsky on Unsplash

Trump may be down, but he isn’t out. Disregard Trump at your own risk.

1. Polls can be off. Again.

We are barraged with headlines that Biden is beating Trump. But the election hasn’t happened yet, and the political cognoscenti only assumes that Biden is headed towards victory because of polling.

But polling can be off, as we saw in 2016.

An oversimplified view of polling in the last presidential election: national polling was generally accurate (Clinton was +3 in national polls the day of the election, she finished +2) and some statewide polls were inaccurate because education wasn’t weighted enough (Trump outperformed expectations with non-college educated whites, which weren’t surveyed enough in some battleground polls).

Pollsters have remedied last election’s missteps. But it is still possible that another polling error, perhaps even greater than 2016’s, could allow Trump to narrowly edge out Biden in the Electoral College.

Two silver linings for Biden:

Even if you account for the same polling error in 2016, Biden would still be favored to win. For example, if Biden leads in Wisconsin by eight, as some polls have him currently faring, the Democrat…

Peter Ramirez
Peter Ramirez

Written by Peter Ramirez

political science researcher. former valedictorian. reader/writer. host of “Politics Mostly” podcast.

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