A final look at polling in the seven key swing states that will determine the election
Whatever else one can say about presidential elections involving Donald Trump, they certainly haven’t lacked drama. In 2016, Trump pulled off an upset win over Hillary Clinton, clearing the supposedly unscalable “Blue Wall.” In 2020, as an even bigger underdog, he narrowly lost to Joe Biden, as the wall held—and as Republican-leaning Georgia and Arizona fell. In each case, fewer than 105,000 well-placed votes—a smaller group than have packed a college football stadium—would have swung the election’s outcome. That’s fewer than one in 1,600 of all votes cast, or less than 0.07 percent. It’s a testament to the genius of our system that the Electoral College produced margins of over 70 electoral votes each time, while also avoiding the grisly specter of a nationwide recount. Still, both races went down to the wire.
