Plural Vote - New data show Biden making massive inroads with Trump's base, threatening Trump's re-election chances

New data show Biden making massive inroads with Trump's base, threatening Trump's re-election chances

In the general election, Biden is improving in states with non-college whites to a statistically-significant degree. This demographic shifted to Trump in 2016; a reversal bodes well for Biden. Additionally, Biden has been polling 8.4 points better in the Midwest than Clinton in 2016.

Posted under 2016 ELECTION
Published 9 months ago

Minutes

In general election surveys, Biden is improving in states with non-college whites to a statistically-significant degree. According to exit polls, this segment of the electorate was integral to Trump's win. White Americans without college degrees have been trending towards the GOP for many years, voting for Trump in 2016 by a historically-large margin. A reversal of this trend bodes well for Biden, who is outperforming Clinton the most in states with a higher-than-average population of non-college whites.

Supporting this trend, a breakdown by region also demonstrates that Biden is polling better than Clinton within groups integral to Trump's electoral college majority. Biden has been polling 8.4 points better in the Midwest than Clinton ended up doing in 2016. In comparison, Biden's increase on Clinton's margin averages 5.4 points and a median of 5.0 points across all states.

Region	Biden Improvement Over 2016
Northeast	Biden gain of 2.7 points
West	Biden gain of 3.9 points
South	Biden gain of 5.8 points
Midwest	Biden gain of 8.4 points

There is an r = ~44.5% correlation (with a statistically significant p-value of 0.005) between how much Biden improves over Clinton and the share of non-college whites in a state. The source of the state-by-state polling data is the 2020 presidential electoral forecast published on Plural Vote. Feel free to follow @plural_vote on Twitter for more electoral statistics.

Written by PLURAL VOTE. This article was last updated on 4/5/2020.

Read onTRENDING

FORECAST

Is Trump or Biden winning the race for president?

Our model depends on polls to predict vote outcomes. Past polling error informs our modelling of the uncertainty of our predictions. We model the probabilities using the beta, weibull, and logistic distributions. The Electoral College vote and probability is estimated using 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations. With 218 days left, our poll-based statistical model forecasts that Biden has a 68% probability of winning the Electoral College on election day.

FORECAST

Will Democrats or Republicans win control of the Senate?

2020 ELECTION

Biden is outperforming 2016 in the Sun Belt by 9.6 points as he takes the lead in Texas and Georgia

Compared to 2012, the trend towards the Democrats in the Sun Belt is even more staggering — 10.6 points more for Vice President Biden than President Obama.

2020 ELECTION

New data show Biden making massive inroads with Trump's base, threatening Trump's re-election chance

2016 ELECTION

Polls suggest that Biden is picking up some voters that opposed Clinton because of sexism

Biden is gaining more voters in states where women occupy fewer management positions, a proxy metric for sexism. Polls show Biden improving more on Clinton’s 2016 performance in states where women perform worse than men on various metrics of equality. If these metrics are viewed as proxies for sexism, this is broadly consistent with social science research indicating that hostile sexism played a role in Clinton’s loss in 2016.