“Let’s say Joe Biden performs exactly as national and state polling averages at RealClearPolitics currently suggest. That would be an 8.7 percent advantage in the national popular vote, the largest major-party victory margin since Ronald Reagan’s blowout win over Walter Mondale in 1984. He’d carry all seven battleground states for which there is public polling in the RCP database: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, giving him at least 333 electoral votes” writes Ed Kilgore in New York Magazine.

“A win by this margin could not be dismissed by Republicans as flukey or the product of voter fraud or any other of the rationalizations they might deploy for a squeaker. Biden could claim at least a modest, perhaps a major mandate, particularly since a victory of this magnitude would all but guarantee conquest of the Senate and House gains, too. And to the extent that the burial of Trumpism is an ancillary goal for Biden, a nine-point trouncing with losses in all the battlegrounds would make a 2024 comeback by Trump himself unlikely, while handing an anchor to any designated successors.”

“But the most immediate, and perhaps most important, effect of a large Biden win would be to neutralize Team Trump’s pretty visible plans to contest a close loss based on success in early returns, followed by legal maneuverings, state government machinations, and even violence in the streets to produce a 2000-style victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat.”