Read Now JOE BIDEN: IN THE RACE: An Inside Report on Joe Biden’s Race for The White House Against Donald Trump and Why He Should Win PDF
Can Biden’s Center Hold?After a career built on incremental progress, Joe Biden is promising a Presidency of transformational change. The election will test whether his campaign can bring together a divided Party and a beleaguered country.For weeks, the mantra of the data nerd has been that President Trump can still win reelection. The Democratic nightmare scenario — Trump loses the popular vote but again wins the electoral college — is very much still on the table.But the same statistical models that show a path for Trump also outline an oft-overlooked possibility: an outright landslide for Democratic challenger Joe Biden.The chance of a massive sweep by the former vice president is a reminder that for all the Democrats present this election as a choice between more Trump and a return to normalcy, there’s another possibility on offer. If Biden turns out voters in numbers that give him a huge victory, they may well elect a Congress and state officials eager and able to enact a sweeping progressive agenda.The numbers are clear. The average outcome produced by an election simulator I recently built (you can learn more about it here) gives Biden 319 electoral votes. Trump still has a chance in this model — he wins about 1 in 5 of the scenarios generated. But in roughly 10 percent of the model’s simulations, Biden earned 400 or more electoral votes. In these cases, Biden easily sweeps swing states such as Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Arizona, North Carolina and Wisconsin and reaches deep into red territory to get electoral votes from states such as Georgia, Texas, Iowa and Ohio. In the sunniest simulations, Biden wins enough rural White voters to grab deeply Republican states such as Alaska or South Carolina. Trump mostly keeps his base — Appalachia, the Interior West and the rural South — but those states alone don’t come close to cracking 200 electoral votes.
