“Recent polls could hardly be more reassuring for voters who want to be done with Donald Trump. ‘Biden Builds Largest Lead This Year,’ a CNN headline declared. ‘Biden Hits 55%–41% Against Trump in Biggest National Poll Lead Yet,’ reported The Daily Beast. ‘Republicans should be petrified by the polls,’ a Washington Post opinion piece asserted. Yet the polls also frighten Democrats who, four years ago, got their hopes up amid favorable numbers for Hillary Clinton” Stanley Greenberg writes in The Atlantic.

“Noting reports that Joe Biden holds a healthy lead in Michigan—one of three Rust Belt states in which Trump narrowly upset Clinton—Representative Debbie Dingell told participants in a recent online Democratic campaign event, ‘I don’t believe these numbers.’ And Dingell, who introduced herself at the event as ‘Debbie Downer,’ has standing to dispute polls that look rosy for her party. In 2016, she’d warned me that the Clinton campaign was going badly in Macomb County—the suburban home of the white, working-class, Catholic voters whom my research decades earlier had labeled ‘Reagan Democrats.’ Dingell’s fear that Clinton could lose Michigan was borne out.”

“But this moment is very different. To start, during the summer and fall of 2016, Clinton never had the kind of national poll lead that Biden now has. She led by an average of four points four months before the election and the same four points just before Election Day. This year, after Biden effectively clinched the nomination, he moved into an average six-point lead over Trump, which has grown to nearly 10 points after the death of George Floyd and the weeks of protests that have followed. The lingering apprehension among Democrats fails to recognize just how much the political landscape has changed since 2016. We are looking at different polls, a different America, and different campaigns with different leaders.”