The Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman predicted Joe Biden will “likely” win the presidential election.
Wasserman, the House editor for the nonpartisan newsletter, made the declaration on Tuesday, one week before Election Day.
“I’d like to ‘sound the alarm’ on Joe Biden: he’s likely to win next week’s presidential election,” he said in a tweet.
I’d like to “sound the alarm” on Joe Biden: he’s likely to win next week’s presidential election.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 27, 2020
Wasserman has long analyzed the ever-changing landscape of congressional races and voters’ sentiments towards President Trump and Biden, his Democratic challenger.
Earlier this month, Wasserman identified 10 bellwether counties that may push critical swing states won by Trump in 2016 to favor Biden. Counties in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were all seen as possibly helping flip the states to Biden in 2020. The first three states are seen as highly critical to win in order to obtain a pathway to the White House.
Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by less than 10 points in 2016 in a victory that broke the states’ blue wall hypothetically erected after years of Democratic dominance.
In an earlier analysis, Wasserman laid out key demographics that could help Trump, including his strengthening support among Latino Americans in Florida. The Trump campaign has also been focused on making inroads in black communities, starting Black Voices for Trump last year to increase voter outreach. Themes of diversity at the Republican National Convention in August played to the focus of increasing outreach to minority voters.
“(Trump’s) doing better with nonwhites than he was doing in 2016,” Wasserman said in September.
But national polls are still showing Biden leading Trump with Election Day just seven days away.
Although polls heavily favored victory for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Wasserman noted in an NBC News analysis on Tuesday that current polling is different in significant ways to the previous election.
The differences include Biden’s lead being far larger and more stable than Clinton’s at this point in the cycle, far fewer undecided and third-party voters this time around, and state-level and district-level polls matching national polls.
“In the end, the only certainty in the polling world is some degree of error,” Wasserman wrote. “There’s no guarantee 2020’s errors will boost Trump again or adhere to the Southwest/Midwest patterns we observed in 2016 and 2018.”
In a New York Times op-ed last month, the editor noted that the road to victory may also be less of a challenge for Biden, who could have several different pathways. The simplest is holding onto the states Clinton won in 2016 and flipping back the narrow victory Trump won in the major battlegrounds that are already leaning in his direction.
“To win the White House, Mr. Biden will need to flip some combination of the 10 states Mr. Trump carried by less than 10 points in 2016,” Wasserman wrote. “Mr. Biden has several paths to victory, and the first three states alone (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin), in addition to every state won by Hillary Clinton, would be enough to put him into the Oval Office.”
