Political statistics crunchers Nate Cohn of The New York Times and J. Miles Coleman and Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia Center for Politics predicted that 2024 would be different from 2016 and 2020 a year ago.
They claimed that the pro-GOP Electoral College bias may be shrinking as national polls show Trump doing better with Black and Latino voters and Democrats doing better in Michigan and Pennsylvania than in California and New York in the 2022 midterms.
"If Trump is improving with young and diverse voters—a debatable proposition, I think, but the polls show it—it may simply give him better margins in states he's already likely to win or lose, like California, Florida, and New York.
Biden leads Trump in California by around 20 points, down from his almost 30-point cushion in 2020, according to recent high-quality California surveys.
In his New York Times essay last year, Cohn wrote: “At the very least, tied national polls today don't mean Mr. Trump leads in the states likeliest to decide the presidency.”
According to head-to-head surveys, Biden and Trump are in a competitive race nationwide, but Trump has held a small, consistent advantage in numerous crucial states, albeit those results are usually within the margin of error.
Polls suggest a pro-Trump Electoral College bias in some battlegrounds but not others. Polling averages can be unreliable for measuring presidential contests due to their diverse techniques, margins of error, and reputations. They can help explain how national polls differ from battleground surveys. The RealClearPolitics average shows Biden and Trump deadlocked in national polls.
They're also close in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, suggesting little to no pro-GOP bias in those states, a change from the last several elections, when both states tipped several points to the right of the national vote. But Trump leads in other battleground states, notably Michigan, which some analysts believe could be the 2024 tipping point.
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