President Donald Trump can tweet about supposed “Fake news!” as much as he wants, but no number of tweets will change the fact that, right now, he is losing his race for re-election — big time. As Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden continues to regularly end up with double-digit leads in national-level polls, FiveThirtyEight estimates as of early this Monday that the Democratic nominee has an about 88 percent chance of winning the election. Trump, meanwhile, has a meager 12 percent chance of winning as of that same point, according to the site. FiveThirtyEight concurrently estimates that Biden will end up with about 347 electoral votes, while Trump nabs just 191.
Although Hillary Clinton, of course, also enjoyed favorable forecasts in some of the final weeks before Election Day in 2016, that election and this one have some significant differences. For starters, Biden’s national-level polling lead has repeatedly been significantly higher than Clinton’s was at equivalent points in the 2016 cycle. As of Monday morning, Biden leads Trump on the national level by an average of a whopping 10.6 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight. Although the respective websites calculate their polling averages differently, on October 19, 2016, the RealClearPolitics average of national-level polls had Clinton with a 6.5 percent lead, and Clinton’s lead quickly shrunk to less than 2 percent in the final days before Election Day before a slight last-minute bump. Meanwhile, Biden’s lead has been in the double-digits for about a week and a half according to FiveThirtyEight.
Projections don’t look much better for Democrats when it comes to the U.S. Senate, where a full 23 Republicans are running for re-election. As of Monday morning, FiveThirtyEight estimates that Democrats have a 74 percent chance of becoming the majority party in the U.S. Senate, which would be critical for helping ensure the success of a potential Biden presidency. Democrats’ chances for major success in the U.S. Senate are buoyed by strong showings in races in Maine, Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, and elsewhere. The Cook Political Report estimates that a full nine currently GOP-held seats are either toss-ups or leaning towards the Democrats ahead of Election Day.
Why should majorities of Americans want to re-elect Republicans, anyway? Donald Trump has led the nation into deadly chaos, refusing to take the Coronavirus crisis seriously while thousands and tens of thousands of Americans have died. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have enabled the Trump administration’s chaos. All but one (Mitt Romney) were even willing to essentially look the other way when Trump was impeached for having tried to bribe Ukraine into investigating the Bidens.
