Warning light No. 2: Biden’s state-level approval. After all, while we quote national numbers all the time for a variety of purposes, in the real world there is no such thing as a national popular-vote election, especially for Congress. Most pollsters at this point are just running national polls because they are cheaper to produce.
One pollster running regular breakouts of its numbers by state is the online pollster Civiqs. Standard cautions apply about relying on a single pollster, and Civiqs is not one of the most reliable pollsters out there; Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives it a B-minus grade. But that is mainly because Civiqs, which was founded by Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos, had nearly a 3-point bias toward Democrats in 2020. Of the 22 polls it published in October 2020, 20 reported results more favorable to Democrats than the final result, including calling Biden the winner of Florida, North Carolina, and Iowa.
If you look at where Biden stands today in the state-by-state polling on the Civiqs website, it is . . . not pretty…
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