Don’t Be Fooled: Polls Show Biden Leads Trump by the Most of Democratic Candidates, in both Swing State and National Surveys Toby Muresianu Follow Feb 2 · 4 min read

Polls are telling a clear story: Joe Biden has the largest lead on Trump in polling both in swing states and national polls.

Looking at the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls, Biden lead with an average of a 5.4-point lead on Trump, while Sanders averaged a 3.7-point lead, Warren a 1.8 point lead, and Buttigieg trailed Trump by 0.3 points.

This is also reflected in the four most recent national polls of head-to-head matchups between Trump and the Democratic frontrunners, Biden is ran 2 to 3 points ahead of Bernie Sanders in all of them. They both tended to outperform Warren and Buttigieg, with Bloomberg doing surprisingly well in the polls he was included in (ahead of Sanders and tied or a point behind Biden):

This may come as a surprise to you if you read the widely shared articles like Newsweek’s “Bernie Sanders leads Donald Trump by the widest margin of electoral candidates,” which skyrocketed to the top of reddit and was engaged with over 600,000 times across all platforms, based on a single poll.

An enormously popular post on reddit on a poll favorable to Bernie.

A look at viral engagement on the story from BuzzSumo.com.

However, this is why it is important to aggregate multiple polls. Individual ones can be outliers, and while they should not be ignored — neither should other ones.

In fact, one way researchers have measured bias in media sources is how often they report poll results that are favorable vs. unfavorable to particular political figures. Social media also carries this bias as it disproportionately spreads reporting of polls favorable to a politician among communities where they have high levels of support.

It’s also important to note that the winner of the popular vote does not always win the election (as you may have noticed in the last few elections), since of course the electoral college determines the outcome. So the more important measure of electability is the polling in swing states.

Here, again, Biden comes out largely ahead:

For active links to the source data, click here

He has a larger lead than Sanders (or Warren or Buttigieg) in every state except Michigan, where he is only 6.5 points up rather than 6.7.

But what does that look like in the electoral college? Something like this:

Biden:

Sanders:

There are caveats here: the swing state polling is often not as current as the national polling (you can see a version of the above table with links to the data sources here). However, the fact that recent national polling is consistent with it lends some credibility.

It’s also worth noting that head to head polling this far out may not be reliable. Website FiveThirtyEight analyzed head to head national polls taken a year out from each election from 1944 to 2012, and found they ended up missing the final election results by about 10 points on average. However, in 2016 it narrowed to 3 points; with the increased partisanship and stability of polling in the last presidential term relative to past presidents, it seems likely that this gap could narrow even further.

The good news if you are planning to support the Democratic candidate is that both Bernie and Trump could certainly win. And polling doesn’t entirely reflect factors like ground game, donations, or other factors that could be unprecedented in this election cycle. And of course, electability isn’t always the sole consideration in picking what candidates to vote for.

But if you had the take of this redditor and after seeing individual polls go viral…

Comment on the previously mentioned viral reddit post

…it’s important to consider what the polling data really says.