For avid poll-watchers such as myself, there has been a noticeable trend in the presidential race as of late. States across the country that are typically considered safe Republican strongholds have been showing narrower-than-usual margins between Pres. Donald Trump and Joe Biden, in many cases single-digit margins in place of the expected two-digit landslide. From South Carolina to Arkansas to Alaska, Trump seems to be losing ground amongst moderate Republican voters. This has led to some pundits speculating that some of these states could come into play in November. While these red state trends should be worrisome to the Trump campaign, I must push back against this notion that a state like Louisiana is going to turn blue for the first time in over two decades. Though the margin is likely to be narrower than past elections, Trump is virtually assured of victory in these GOP bastions.
To illustrate this point, let us look at Nebraska, a deep red state that has not voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since 1964. Nebraska and Maine are the only two states in the country that award their electoral votes according to congressional district rather than a winner-takes-all approach statewide like the other 48. In Nebraska, the only district that is typically polled is its 2nd District, a seat encompassing Omaha that is the most likely to swing Democrats’ way in a presidential election (even this is rare these days, though Obama pulled it off narrowly in 2008). Polling in Nebraska’s 2nd has so far shown Biden with an edge, which, if it holds up in November, would notch the Democratic nominee with a precious elector in what could be a tight race in the electoral college.
Just last week, I saw a new poll out of Nebraska that was conducted in mid July, and it showed Trump with a two point advantage over Joe Biden. Assuming this was a poll for Nebraska’s 2nd District (as that is typically the only district that gets reliably polled in the state), I saw this as a swing in Trump’s favor from his dismal numbers in previous surveys of the Omaha-based seat. However, when I checked the location to be sure, I found myself gobsmacked to find that it was a poll of Nebraska’s solidly red 1st Congressional District, not the relatively more left-friendly 2nd. Donald Trump won this district in a 21-point landslide in 2016, even bigger than Mitt Romney’s 16-point win in 2012. If this narrow 2-point advantage (which in the poll amounted to a statistical tie) would hold in November, that would represent a seismic 19 point shift in favor of the Democratic Party.
Of course, I had to take a deeper look at the poll itself to see how legitimate its finding were. America is replete with pollsters every election cycle, many of them good but just as many bad. My skepticism was rewarded with the discovery that this poll was commissioned for the Democratic nominee for the Congressional seat in the 1st District. Now, this on its own is not necessarily a deal-breaker for the legitimacy of a poll’s findings. Partisan pollsters know their craft, and their goal is obtain useful information for their political candidate. Sometimes this means a hard, unbiased look at how they are doing on the ground. In other cases, this means figuring out how the candidate can better message him- or herself to voters. In this case, it was the latter, with the pollster testing out positive descriptions of the Democratic candidate amongst voters in the 1st District. While it was not clear whether they did the same messaging test for Biden, the fact that this was effectively a best case scenario poll for Kate Bolz, the Democratic House nominee, leads me to believe that the presidential findings should be taken with a grain of salt. It got me thinking, though, about what if the findings were true? If Biden kept his lead in Nebraska’s 2nd (which, I might add, is also based largely on Democratic-commissioned polls, though the large margins suggest that Biden does have a slight edge there), how competitive would he be statewide if he also kept such a close margin with Trump in Nebraska’s 1st?
**********
To test this, I took the statewide voter turnout of Nebraska from 2016 (63%) and applied that to Nebraska’s most recent registered voter count to come to a projected 773,834 votes to be cast in 2020. I broke this down by Nebraska’s three congressional district so that I could apply the poll numbers to the projected vote count. For my scenario, I gave Biden a 7-point lead in Nebraska’s 2nd District (based on a poll showing that margin) as well as Trump’s 2-point margin in NE-1. For Nebraska’s 3rd District, I simply used the 2016 margin. Here’s the breakdown:
1st District: Trump 122,846 votes (48%) Biden 117,728 (46%)
2nd District: Trump 120,610 (44%) Biden 139,798 (51%)
3rd District: Trump 180,405 (75%) Biden 48,758 (20%)
Statewide: Trump 423,861 (54.7%) Biden 306,284 (39.5%)
As you can see, Trump still wins handily, with Biden not even managing to break 40% statewide. The reason for this, as you may have noticed, is the staggering Republican margins in Nebraska’s 3rd District. For some reason, I failed to look into the margins in NE-3 until I began this little experiment, but Trump’s walloping 55-point avalanche from 2016 precluded any chance for Biden to break through in this scenario.
Of course, this poor showing by Biden was already a best case scenario for Democrats in many ways, but for the experiment’s sake I wanted to take things further. I decided to give Biden an 11-point advantage in NE-2, based on a more bullish poll for the Democratic nominee. In this second scenario, these were the statewide results:
Trump 415,637 (53.7%) Biden 309,025 (39.9%)
Granted, I made only a minor change from the first scenario, but even so I was struck that Biden still (barely) failed to reach forty percent! Trump dropped by one percent from 54.7% to 53.7%, but that is still a comfortable majority. It became clear to me that if Biden had any chance at flipping the state, he would have to make a dent in Nebraska’s deep red 3rd District. I looked back at previous elections to see which Democrat performed the best there in modern times. Unsurprisingly, I found that Barack Obama in 2008 posted the best numbers, garnering a whopping….. 30% of the vote to John McCain’s 69%. This was still a relatively big 10-point jump from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 numbers, but it remained a Republican landslide. Even so, I added the 2008 margin to my scenario:
Trump 403,448 (52.1%) Biden 333,404 (43.1%)
Biden finally made it above forty percent, and Trump dropped by about another point and a half. Yet Nebraska still went to Trump by a comfortable 9-point win. I was already pushing the boundaries of rationality with my scenario, but I had one more idea. I decided to flip the NE-1 numbers, giving Biden a two point win. This would mean that Biden would win two electoral votes from Nebraska. I knew that this minor change would be unable to eliminate the 9 point gulf between Trump and Biden, but I was curious to see how close the race would be. This was how my fourth and final scenario panned out:
Trump 398,330 (51.5%) Biden 338,522 (43.7%)
The margin narrowed to slightly less than 8 points, and Trump dropped to below 400,000 votes for the first time. Still a definite victory for the President, but this would be a race that would likely take a bit of time to call, even if there was no pandemic going on. Typically, Nebraska is the kind of state that can be called for the Republican nominee as soon as the polls close. In this scenario, Biden would take 2 electoral votes to Trump’s 3 (one from the 3rd District and two for winning Nebraska statewide). Despite winning two of Nebraska’s three Congressional districts, Biden would not come all that close to notching the state as a whole. Trump’s firewall in the heavily rural and conservative 3rd District protects him from any reasonable chance of a Democratic flip, even in a best case scenario for Biden that strains credulity. I was not surprised to learn shortly after conducting this experiment that FiveThirtyEight’s recently released projection model of the 2020 election ranks Nebraska’s 3rd Congressional District as the single safest Republican electoral vote in the country.
**********
While I took a look at Nebraska in particular, it is important to remember that similar conservative and liberal bastions exist in almost every state in the country. When we see a narrowing presidential race in states like Kansas or Alaska, that is likely a reflection of narrowing margins in more moderately Republican regions. But I would be willing to bet that Trump’s remaining lead is built on deep red strongholds in those states that preclude any chance of a Democratic victory. Many of these states have large rural populations, just like Nebraska’s 3rd District. Trump’s safe position in Nebraska should serve as a caution to observers who wonder if Biden could notch wins beyond the swing states. While Trump may not be in real danger of losing reliably red states, his narrowing lead in these states should be worrying for Republicans. If Pres. Trump cannot rack up big double-digit wins in the South and Great Plains, then will he really be able to win swing states that lack Republican cushions like Nebraska’s 3rd?
Comments