Amy Walter: “One of the theories given for why pre-election polling underestimated President Trump’s share of the vote was that pollsters failed to anticipate the huge surge in turnout among Trump’s base. One hypothesis is that these voters presented themselves as ambivalent voters — showing less interest in voting than others — and as such, didn’t make it through a likely voter screen. However, given the fact that the long-stated goal of the Trump campaign was to find, register and turn out every single person who fit into the Trump demographic —especially white voters living in small town and rural areas of the Midwest — the fact that these voters ultimately showed up Election Day shouldn’t necessarily come as such a surprise.”

“Regardless, the battle over ‘what the pollsters got wrong’ is missing the bigger picture: Trump’s all-base-all-the-time strategy was a failure. As I’d written about a lot during the campaign, Trump had a 50 percent problem. In 2016, Trump won six states — Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — with less than 50 percent of the vote. Without a significant third-party candidate or candidates on the ballot this year, getting a plurality of the vote would not be enough to win a state. Back in June, I wrote: ‘Biden doesn’t need to win all of these states to win. He just needs a combination of three of them to get to 270… That’s why it’s more important than ever to understand if Trump’s vote share in 2016 was his ceiling, or whether he has room to grow.’ The results show that he did grow his showing — but only slightly — and not enough to get to 50 percent in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin or Arizona. Moreover, he actually lost ground (1.1 percent) in Georgia — a state he had carried with just 50.4 percent in 2016.”