November 3, 2020 is a big fucking deal.

 New York Times

How Trump can win

Across the political spectrum, many Americans are obsessed with the idea that President Trump will pull off another surprise victory this November. Today, I want to look at how such a victory might happen.

If recent polls are perfectly accurate, Joe Biden will win comfortably, taking both the Upper Midwest and several Sun Belt states. But they may not be.

The state-by-state polls could be off in a systematic way, as they were in 2016, when they underestimated Trump’s white working-class support. Pollsters have tried to fix that problem, and there is no reason to believe they have failed, as The Times’s Nate Cohn says. But polling is an inexact science, made harder by the decline in landline phones.

The bigger issue is that the campaign isn’t over, and Trump could gain support in the final weeks. One possibility is that the coming Supreme Court confirmation battle will sway some conservative voters who are dissatisfied with Trump. If the campaign were a referendum on his presidency, they might vote for Biden. If the confirmation battle instead gets them thinking about whether they’re conservative or liberal, they could come home to Trump.

The Upshot’s polling scorecard offers a useful way to think about this: Trump will narrowly win re-election if the results differ from the current polls by as much (and in the same direction) as the 2016 results differed from the final polls.

In this scenario, he would probably still lose the popular vote. But he would win all the states where he leads or trails very narrowly, like Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio — and Arizona, where most polls show him trailing but a new ABC/Washington Post poll this morning shows a virtual tie. Even with those, Trump would need one more, and the most likely seems to be Pennsylvania, where Biden’s lead has hovered around 5 percentage points.

Only a few years ago, Pennsylvania was more Democratic than the country as a whole, but it has shifted right, driven by its large number of white residents without a college degree. Trump is trying to appeal to them by emphasizing both many Democrats’ hostility to fracking (Biden’s own position is more nuanced) and the coronavirus lockdown imposed by the state’s Democratic governor, according to The Times’s Trip Gabriel, who has reported from the state.

Notably, Trump trails in Pennsylvania by less than he does in Wisconsin or Michigan, two other states he won in 2016. “Pennsylvania has to be troubling the Biden campaign,” Trip says.

A Trump victory may end up involving another factor: disputed mail ballots. (Thomas Edsall, a Times Opinion writer, lists those ballots as one of five reasons for Biden to worry.)

The Trump campaign has consistently tried to make voting more difficult, believing that low turnout benefits the president. Last week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court sided with the campaign and ruled that election officials could not count mailed ballots that arrived in only a single envelope, rather than including a second “secrecy” envelope.

One local official told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the ruling could lead to more than 100,000 completed ballots being thrown out — or between 1 and 2 percent of the total likely to be cast.