Rachel Bitecofer: Trump is losing big to Biden in voter polls. Here's how this will likely play out

CBS Marketwatch

“The only poll that matters is the one on Election Day.” This election adage gets tossed out pretty much every time a new political poll drops — a product of the many election night surprises seen over the years, where the winner of the election ended up being the loser of the polls.

This is exactly what happened in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when key Midwestern states in the Democrats’ “Blue Wall” consistently produced leads for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump that were well outside of the margins of error, but where Trump ended up with narrow victories — a trifecta of upsets for the record books.

The 2016 election has left many voters in 2020 with polling PTSD. During the Democratic primary period, Joe Biden, now the party’s presumptive nominee and then one of only two Democratic prospects with name recognition high enough to conduct head-to-head ballot tests against President Trump, enjoyed on average a 4.5-point advantage against Trump — just outside most survey’s margins of error.

Had the dynamics of the race stayed there, Democratic hand-wringing and poll-doubting would no doubt still be quite intense. At that time only my forecasting model was confident of a Biden victory in November’s general election. But a once-a-century global pandemic has altered American life, sent the U.S. economy into a tailspin, and tested America’s “chaos president” — a test many voters now say Trump is failing.