A new projection showing Donald Trump’s potential popular vote tally on election night paints a worrying picture for the incumbent, President Joe Biden.
Trump currently leads Biden in numerous national poll aggregates, including a Thursday morning RealClearPolling (RCP) average that shows Trump with a 1% lead in an average of eleven polls conducted throughout May and June. According to a projection that factors in national poll changes and polling errors from 2020, if Trump’s 1% lead holds — or grows —come Election Day, Biden may be poised to suffer a resounding defeat.
Trump’s 306-232 electoral college victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, the biggest electoral college victory for a Republican since 1988, coincided with a 2% loss to the Democratic candidate in the national vote. The race ultimately came down to roughly 100,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. (RELATED: Here Are The Senate Republicans Who Have Not Endorsed Trump)
In 2020, Biden also won the Electoral College 306-232, but his popular vote victory was substantially larger than Clinton’s, winning by 4.5%. The difference was ultimately decided over 40,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.
It will be difficult for the Democrats to win a presidential election in which they lose the popular vote, or even win it by less than 4.5%, should this year’s results be anything like 2016 and 2020. The national environment will likely need to favor Democrats by a significant margin, as Trump winning the popular vote (even by 1%) foreshadows a bigger electoral margin than his victory in 2016.
So, what could an election night like this look like?
A projection adjusted for each state’s 2020 result by the change in the national polls, and taking into account 2020’s polling error, would yield a result that strongly favors Trump, showing the former president winning by a larger electoral vote margin than he did in 2016.
In this scenario, swing states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are deemed ‘Likely Trump’ (between 6 and 9.99%) with other more Democratic-friendly swing states like Michigan and Nevada landing in the ‘Lean Trump’ column (between 2 and 5.99%). Trump also flips the Democratic-leaning states of Minnesota and New Hampshire by a ‘Tilt’ margin (.01-1.99%) in this calculation.
Some reliably blue states are also decided by narrower margins than expected, with Illinois, Oregon and New Jersey being deemed ‘Likely Biden,’ according to this projection. The same goes for Colorado and New Mexico, each of which earned a ‘Lean Biden” designation.
Notably, Biden would win Maine and Virginia, which leaned significantly toward Democrats in 2020, by only ‘Tilt’ margins, according to this projection.
It is also likely that, if the final four states to be called on election night are Minnesota, New Hampshire, Maine and Virginia, then a former president will be returning to the White House for the first time since 1893.
