Swingin' Joe Biden!

Sabato's Crystal Ball has a very useful article up from Alan Abramowitz on how Biden is doing vs.Trump in 2016 swing states (defined as carried by either side by less than 6 points). The chart below is well worth the price of admission.

The key takeaway: "The data displayed in Table 1 show that, based on recent polling, Joe Biden is substantially outperforming both Hillary Clinton’s actual vote margin and her final polling margin in these 13 states. Biden is currently leading Trump in all 13 states by margins ranging from 0.3 points in Georgia to 17 points in Colorado. On average, Biden is running more than six points ahead of Clinton’s 2016 margin in the polls."

This suggests, as other analysts have argued, that Biden is probably running ahead of Trump by 8 points nationally, since Clinton won the popular vote by 2 points so 6 points ahead of that would be 8 points.

I thought it would be interesting to check the Abramowitz' poll of polls for these states against the Nationscape data. With 6000 cases a week, the cumulative data since the beginning of the year provides robust samples of respondents for even the small states. Here are the data for the Nationscape Biden margins in each state:

Arizona tie
Colorado +13
Florida +4
Georgia +5
Maine +3
Michigan +11
Minnesota +10
North Carolina tie
New Hampshire +9
Nevada +11
Pennsylvania +6
Virginia +16
Wisconsin.+8

A lot of similarity there, though Nationscape is more bullish on the Rustbelt states and less so or Arizona. And in a very pleasing fashion, the average Biden lead is 6.3 points, virtually identical with the Abramowitz' computer margin. This again suggest Biden is running 6 points ahead of Clinton in these states and probably about 8 points ahead nationally.

http://centerforpolitics.org/…/recent-polling-in-the-swing…/