Biden has been fading since second debate

 John Ellis:

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I’ve been covering American politics for a long time and I can’t remember a number that so dramatically altered the political community’s perception of a presidential campaign as that number did, last night, at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

The source of the number was The Iowa Poll, which has been the gold standard for statewide polling in the United States for decades. The number itself was the percentage of likely voters in Iowa supporting Joe Biden’s candidacy for president.

President Trump’s number was 48%, which put him ahead in the “horse race” by 7 percentage points. There was nothing really remarkable about that, in context. Mr. Trump won the state in 2016 by (roughly) nine percentage points.

What was remarkable was Biden’s 41%. What made it doubly disconcerting was the way The Des Moines Register (accurately) described the poll results:

“Republican President Donald Trump has taken over the lead in Iowa as Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden has faded…”

Faded! Could there be a more terrible word in the last week of a presidential campaign? Off the record, Democratic elected officials and campaign operatives and financial backers have been saying throughout the campaign that their biggest fear regarding the eventual outcome was Biden himself. They saw him as an especially weak candidate and worried that he wasn’t “a closer;” even if he was ahead going into the last week, victory could slip from his grasp.

Up until last night, Democratic elected officials and political operatives saw the presidential race standing at somewhere between a narrow Biden win and a “blue wave.” In their “blue wave” scenario, the Democrats would win both the presidency and a Senate majority and the Trump-McConnell nightmare would finally come to an end.

That was the other piece of bad news in last night’s Iowa Poll release. It showed that Republican Sen. Joni Ernst had pulled ahead of her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield. Her lead (46%-to-42%) was within the margin of error, but it wasn’t Ms. Ernst’s lead that Democrats were focused on. It was the “faded” support for Ms. Greenfield, which almost exactly tracked the “faded” support for Joe Biden.
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Power Line points out that other polls have been moving in favor of Trump. 

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First: The polls are shifting in the last days before the election, just as they did in 2016. From Townhall, “If New Batch of Polls are Correct, Trump Will Soar Past 300 Electoral Votes.” Check out the polls cited there. They include Michigan (Trump 48/46), Pennsylvania (Trump 49/47), Wisconsin (Trump 50/49), Florida (Trump 49/45), and so on. We are at the point where polls are pretty much meaningless, but I don’t think it is coincidental that 2020 is just about a carbon copy of 2016. Most “mainstream” pollsters gave Biden a big lead early, I think for the purpose of aiding Democratic fundraising and discouraging Republicans, and then, in the last days before the election, they show the race tightening to within the margin of error–I suspect because they have changed their weighting of responses–so that no matter what happens, they can’t be “wrong.”
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