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How Will Trump’s Positive COVID-19 Test Affect The Election?

Welcome to an emergency edition of FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited, and updated with the news that Joe Biden has tested negative for the coronavirus.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Very early Friday morning, President Trump tweeted that he and First Lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID-19. That news came just after reports on Thursday that White House senior advisor Hope Hicks had tested positive.

There’s a lot we still don’t know at this point, including the extent of White House staff affected or the severity of the president’s symptoms, but with about a month until Election Day, this is … an October surprise, to say the least.

Let’s start with one of the big questions: What does this mean for the election?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): So for some reason I’m finding it hard to think through the electoral implications this morning. Maybe I need even more coffee. My thoughts right now are mostly some combination of:

Seriously how the F*CK does this happen? Shouldn’t everybody in the president’s orbit have been tested constantly?
And, OF COURSE this happened because 2020 and because the president clearly was not taking that many precautions

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): My overall answer is, “I have no idea how this affects the election.” This is truly unprecedented, as far as I know, in American elections — the president getting a serious virus weeks before the election. I can’t think of any leader abroad who has gotten a virus like this weeks before the election either (though I am not an expert on elections outside of the United States).

So while I have some general thoughts, I wanted to lay that out first. I truly have no idea what to expect, how voters will react to Trump’s positive test, how the media will cover it or how other candidates will react.

I.

Don’t.

Know.

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): Yeah — it’s such a black box and honestly so dependent on what happens next. Does Trump get really sick? Does he stay mostly asymptomatic? How far did the virus spread in the White House? All questions we can’t answer right now, of course. But hugely important for how people respond.

natesilver: Yeah. We’re going to be saying “I don’t know” a lot in this chat. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with thinking through the electoral implications. There’s an election happening literally NOW — millions of people have already voted. So Americans are wrestling with this stuff. We just don’t have a lot of good answers.

ameliatd: And, of course, there’s an open question about whether Joe Biden will test positive, after he and Trump were at the debate together on Tuesday. [Editor’s note: Biden tested negative for the coronavirus after the conclusion of this chat.]

natesilver: Right, and one thing I’m not sure people realize is that there can be several days between exposure and a positive test. So we won’t know for sure which people have or don’t have COVID-19 for a bit here.

ameliatd: In the meantime, though, this does mean that Trump can’t campaign for at a while, right? And what about the debates, which were supposed to be on Oct. 15 and 22? Do those still happen?

How much does it matter if Trump can’t campaign, though? This was already a deeply bizarre year and I’m not sure his rallies were going to put him over the edge.

natesilver: Zoom debates?

ameliatd: Everyone wanted that automatic mute last time!

natesilver: At a very basic, square-one level, COVID-19 is a huge liability for the president, and so placing more focus on COVID-19 probably isn’t great for him. But I don’t know how useful that is as a prior. Could Trump getting COVID-19 change his messaging around the virus and pandemic? Maybe. But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. He’s not inclined to be overly disciplined or deferential to scientists, etc. He’s pretty unpredictable, and we don’t yet know a lot about how serious his symptoms are. And this is a bad disease that can have cognitive effects in addition to physical ones.

Also in terms of very, basic, non-debatable priors: the president’s re-election bid was in DEEP trouble going into this, at least by conventional measures. And the smattering of post-debate polls we’d gotten had been particularly bad for him. So just worth keeping that in mind.

sarah: Absolutely. But on the question of how this happened … The Trump campaign has not taken precautions seriously. They’ve continued to hold large, in-person events. And they’ve even mocked the Biden campaign for wearing masks.

Is one possible scenario from this that Americans take the coronavirus more seriously? Views on COVID-19 and Trump’s response to it are polarized by party, but how could Trump’s positive test change public opinion?

ameliatd: I think what happens with public opinion really depends on how sick Trump gets. As I wrote over the summer, a big part of the reason Republicans are not as into COVID-19 restrictions is that they are much, much less likely to view the virus as a personal health threat to them.

And research has indicated that Trump downplaying the virus is probably a significant driver of that. So I could see this playing out at least two ways …

Trump gets moderately or very sick and this does prompt Republicans to think, “Oh geez, this actually is serious and if it could happen to Trump it could happen to me”;
Trump remains mostly asymptomatic and it bolsters the idea that this is actually not such a big deal.

perry: So, writing this on Friday morning, here’s what I expect …

The overwhelming majority of people, even those who are older, don’t die from COVID-19. So the most likely outcome is that Trump and some of his staffers have COVID-19, stay somewhat distanced from everyone for two weeks and then Trump returns to campaigning for reelection (I am not sure if he has the big rallies, but I wouldn’t rule that out.) I am not even sure the next two debates have to be canceled — particularly the Oct 22 one. And basically nothing has shaken Trump’s job approval ratings or really the race overall. I don’t really expect this to shift things either.

The president testing positive for COVID-19 is obviously hugely significant, but it’s not revelatory. We already knew Trump was not taking the virus seriously enough. Now, we have a much more obvious manifestation of that fact, but nothing is really different. Biden may not be able to attack Trump as bluntly on COVID now, for decorum reasons, but this positive test reinforces Biden’s message that Trump has let this crisis get out of hand. So this matters, but I’m not sure it matters electorally in terms of shifting a lot of people’s votes.

ameliatd: I know we’re thinking way down the line now, but is it possible that battling and surviving COVID-19 could actually make Trump more popular in some corners? Especially if he doesn’t get very sick?

natesilver: Amelia, I’m not sure I really buy that. I mean, somehow if it made the president into a more empathetic person, maybe, I suppose? But (i) I’m not sure that’s how he’s likely to react as opposed to sending 6,000 tweets about the “China Virus” or something; and (ii) he’s been trying to project a lot of macho-ness/dominance and to portray Biden as old and feeble and I’m not sure how contracting a serious disease himself fits into that.

ameliatd: Well, but if he contracts a serious disease and doesn’t get very sick and recovers fairly quickly — that certainly doesn’t seem as bad for him.

natesilver: I guess if he recovers in a couple of weeks, which is still what happens for most people, maybe he’ll say he kicked COVID’s ass and/or it wasn’t that serious. But I don’t think that necessarily affects anything electorally.

ameliatd: So, is the main impact potentially less about politics and more about the way Americans think about the virus? Either prompting Republicans to take it more seriously or reinforcing their sense that this really isn’t a big deal?

There was research back in March indicating that COVID-19 spreading at CPAC helped drive a brief moment when Republicans and Democrats were on the same page about the seriousness of the virus.

perry: So I don’t buy this idea that Trump will get COVID-19, be fine and then start calling it “Fake News.” We just learned Ronna McDaneil, the RNC chair, has also tested positive. So has Hope Hicks, a top Trump adviser. [Editor’s note: Sen. Mike Lee of Utah has since announced that he has also tested positive.] I think enough people in Trump’s circle may have the virus that THOSE PEOPLE start taking this more seriously, basically forcing him to as well.

natesilver: This is one sort of message we might hear, I guess:

Remember: China gave this virus to our President @realDonaldTrump and First Lady @FLOTUS.  

WE MUST HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE.

— Kelly Loeffler (@KLoeffler) October 2, 2020

sarah: But this question of whether it will change how seriously people perceive the coronavirus is an interesting one. Americans overall, as we saw in our debate polling with Ipsos, listed the coronavirus as their No. 1 issue:

COVID-19 and the economy are Americans’ top two issues

Share of respondents who named each issue as the top one facing the U.S., according to a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll

issue
share of
all Respondents




COVID-19
31.7%

–



The economy
21.6

–



Health care
7.9

–



Racial inequality
7.4

–



Climate change
5.2

–



Violent crime
4.8

–



The Supreme Court
4.5

–



Economic inequality
3.0

–



Immigration
2.8

–



Education
2.6

–



Abortion
2.3

–



Gun policy
1.9

–



Other
1.6

–

Data comes from polling done by Ipsos for FiveThirtyEight, using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, a probability-based online panel that is recruited to be representative of the U.S. population. The poll was conducted Sept. 21-28 among a general population sample of adults, with 3,133 respondents and a margin of error of /- 1.9 percentage points.

However, among potential Trump supporters a much smaller share (15.5 percent) said the coronavirus was their most important issue, many more were concerned about the economy:

Potential Trump voters care most about the economy

Among respondents who were more likely to vote for Trump than Biden, share who named each issue as the top one facing the U.S., according to a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll

issue
share of
trump supporters




The economy
38.4%

–



COVID-19
15.5

–



Violent crime
9.5

–



The Supreme Court
6.2

–



Abortion
5.4

–



Health care
4.9

–



Immigration
4.8

–



Education
3.9

–



Gun policy
3.4

–



Other
2.4

–



Racial inequality
1.8

–



Economic inequality
1.6

–



Climate change
0.5

–

Respondents were asked to rate how likely they were to vote for each candidate on a scale of 0-10. Respondents were deemed more likely to vote for whichever candidate they gave a higher score. Respondents who gave both candidates the same score are not included.

Data comes from polling done by Ipsos for FiveThirtyEight, using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, a probability-based online panel that is recruited to be representative of the U.S. population. The poll was conducted Sept. 21-28 among a general population sample of adults, with 3,133 respondents and a margin of error of /- 1.9 percentage points.

I think you could argue that the economy is probably linked to coronavirus among Trump supporters, but this could be a moment that has public health repercussions, yes?

ameliatd: Well, there was a jobs report this morning — one that I suspect is now going to get a LOT less attention. It was kinda positive — if you can consider the unemployment rate falling just under 8 percent positive.

perry: I think there could be a bunch of real, important health outcomes from this …

GOP governors and mayors may be a bit more hesitant to lift COVID restrictions;
Democratic mayors and governors may cite Trump’s positive test as part of their messaging on keeping restrictions in place;
Republican voters may become a bit less dismissive of COVID, in part because GOP elites take it more seriously;
Overall, this news could be important and have a positive impact in terms of Americans taking the virus more seriously.

ameliatd: Yeah, I’m also wondering if this will change the way Republican governors approach restrictions, which are all but completely lifted in some states.

Although I do think it’s important to note that the vast majority of Americans say they’ve been complying with public health guidelines like mask-wearing, even if Republicans are much less likely to agree with government restrictions on businesses.

perry: To take an example: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, is never going to give a press conference and say something like, “I was downplaying COVID-19 but then Trump got it and it reinforced how serious this was.” At least, I think that will never happen?

natesilver: I suppose I’m skeptical that this will necessarily change all that much. As you can see from the Kelly Loeffler tweet above, there are lots of partisan responses that don’t necessarily involve taking the disease more seriously per se.

Now, if Trump said something like what Perry just laid out, i.e. “I wasn’t taking this seriously enough, and I now understand the error of my ways…” then OK! That could make a difference! But I’m not sure that’s necessarily the most likely outcome.

ameliatd: But for regular people, I think a lot of this is about the gut-level fear that this might happen to them. Trump downplaying it, not wearing a mask, and not getting sick almost certainly helped reinforce the feeling among Republicans that it’s not a big deal. So I also think the way this is presented in conservative media, how visible Trump’s illness is — all of that matters for how people respond.

It’s true that the partisan response is pretty baked in at this point. But if Trump gets really sick, I could see that changing. Of course, if Republican governors start being more cautious with restrictions again and more people lose their jobs — that raises questions for whether a new stimulus package might actually get off the ground, too. I remain skeptical that will happen! But maybe there’s more pressure to break the stalemate in Congress?

sarah: There are a number of possibilities here, the most pressing one, of course, is that Trump can’t campaign — not to mention if Vice President Mike Pence has to step in. What should we be looking for as this story develops?

ameliatd: Trump’s symptoms are obviously a big one. And if they’re serious, there might be calls to take him off the ballot.

natesilver: Right, part of what makes this tough to predict — and I’m not against prediction! — is that we don’t yet know if Trump will have a mild or severe case, how many people in his orbit are also infected, etc.

perry: Assuming Trump recovers, what does his campaign look like on Oct. 16? Is he still holding big rallies? Is he wearing a mask? Are his staffers? Does the Oct. 22 debate take place, and in person? What about the Oct. 15 one? Is he further dismissing the virus because he survived it?

natesilver: Let’s also keep in mind that the recovery process isn’t quick for some people. It can take months, or longer — long-term COVID symptoms are scary.

Trump’s Chances Are Dwindling. That Could Make Him Dangerous.

President Trump’s quest to win a second term is not in good shape. He entered Tuesday night’s debate with roughly a 7- or 8-point deficit in national polls, putting him further behind at this stage of the race than any other candidate since Bob Dole in 1996.1

If we look at potential tipping-point states, the race is a bit closer, but not that much closer. After a couple of strong polls for Joe Biden earlier this week in Pennsylvania — the state that’s currently most likely to decide the election — Trump now trails there by 5 to 6 points. He’s down by about 7 points in Michigan and Wisconsin, meanwhile. Those states, along with Minnesota, Maine and New Hampshire — where Biden has also polled strongly lately — suggest that Biden is winning back some of the Obama-Trump white working-class voters who flocked to Trump four years ago. Indeed, Biden is as close to winning South Carolina or Alaska as Trump is to winning Michigan and Wisconsin, based on recent polls of those states.

At a time when Trump desperately needed a boost, the debate probably didn’t help him either — it may have hurt him. Every scientific poll we’ve seen had Trump losing the debate, some by narrow margins and some by wide ones.

That includes the poll FiveThirtyEight conducted with Ipsos, which surveyed the same group of voters before and after the debate. While the poll didn’t show a massive swing — most voters stuck to their initial preferences — more voters did rate Biden’s performance favorably, and Biden gained ground relative to Trump based on the number of voters who said they were certain to vote for him, roughly tantamount to a 3-point swing toward Biden in head-to-head polls.

Now, I’m not predicting this will happen, but if Biden’s national lead were to expand to 9 or 10 points, which is consistent with the sorts of polling bounces we’ve seen in the past for candidates who were perceived to win debates — especially challengers debating an incumbent for the first time — Trump’s situation could become quite desperate.

To be clear, none of this means that Trump’s chances are kaput. As of this writing, our forecast still gives him around a 21 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. That’s not great, but it’s a lot better than zero.

But it’s possible Trump’s chances may decline further after post-debate polling begins to roll into our forecast. Furthermore, the mere passage of time helps Biden in our model, because every day that Trump doesn’t gain ground is a day when his fate becomes slightly more sealed. (Lots of people have already voted!) Case in point: In an election held today — Trump has no more time to make up ground — his chances would be 9 percent, not 21 percent, according to our forecast.

Then again, there are some possibilities that our model doesn’t account for, and they have become more pertinent after Trump has repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and declined to commit to respecting the election results. As we wrote when launching the forecast:

We assume that there are reasonable efforts to allow eligible citizens to vote and to count all legal ballots, and that electors are awarded to the popular-vote winner in each state. The model also does not account for the possibility of extraconstitutional shenanigans by Trump or by anyone else, such as trying to prevent mail ballots from being counted.

Let’s back up for a second. This is FiveThirtyEight’s fourth presidential election campaign. And in the previous three, there was at least some question about who was ahead in the stretch run of the race. John McCain, for instance, briefly pulled ahead of Barack Obama following the 2008 Republican convention, and Obama didn’t really solidify his lead until early October. In 2012, national polls were very tight between Obama and Mitt Romney following the first presidential debate, and remained fairly tight thereafter (although Obama always maintained an Electoral College edge). And people forget how close the 2016 race was for stretches of the campaign; it was not such a huge upset. In fact, Hillary Clinton led by only 1.4 points in our national polling average heading into the first debate that year.

But there isn’t any of that ambiguity this time. Since we launched our general election polling averages on June 18, Biden has never led by less than 6.6 points nationally. Literally only one national poll — a Rasmussen Reports poll that put Trump ahead by less than a full percentage point — has shown Trump leading by any margin during that period. It’s been an exceptionally stable race.

But, amazingly, that hasn’t really shaken people’s confidence in Trump’s ability to win. In our own poll with Ipsos, we found respondents thought Biden and Trump had roughly equally likely chances of winning. And maybe that boils down to three perpetual sources of anxiety I hear in conversation with liberal friends or liberal readers:

Trump could win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by a wide margin.
There could be a large polling error in Trump’s favor.
Trump could somehow steal the election.

All three are legitimate sources of concern for Biden backers. The first two are relatively easy to quantify, however. Indeed, the whole purpose of a model like FiveThirtyEight’s presidential forecast is to answer questions like those. The third one, however, is harder to get a handle on, so let’s talk about No. 1 and 2 first..

The Electoral College could still help Trump, but it only goes so far

The possibility of an Electoral College, popular vote split remains a point in Trump’s favor. In fact, there’s an 11 percent chance that Trump wins the Electoral College but not the popular vote in our forecast (but less than a 1 percent chance the other way around). At the same time, Biden’s strength in the Upper Midwest relative to Clinton’s — at least, if polls are correct there — potentially mitigates this disadvantage to some extent. The table below shows Biden’s probability of winning the Electoral College given various popular vote margins, according to our forecast as of Wednesday afternoon. And as you can see, Biden is only truly safe to win the Electoral College once he has a popular vote margin of 5 points or more! But, he’s a fairly heavy favorite with a 3- to 5-point margin, and has roughly break-even odds with a 2- to 3-point margin.

Biden’s favored, if he wins the popular vote by 2 to 3 points

Chances of Biden winning the Electoral College under different popular vote scenarios, according to the FiveThirtyEight presidential forecast, as of Sept. 30

POPULAR VOTE MARGIN scenarios
Biden’s chances

of winning the ELECTORAL COLLEGE




Biden 6 to Biden 7
>99%


Biden 5 to Biden 6
98


Biden 4 to Biden 5
93


Biden 3 to Biden 4
77


Biden 2 to Biden 3
54


Biden 1 to Biden 2
29


TIE to Biden 1
11


Trump 1 to TIE
3


Trump 2 to Trump 1

So, for practical purposes, you can take Biden’s lead in national polls and subtract 2 or 2.5 points from it to infer his margin in tipping-point states. In other words, if he’s ahead by around 7.5 points in national polls, that’s more like the equivalent of a 5-point lead in the Electoral College. That’s still a reasonably large advantage; empirically, it’s not that easy to overcome a 5-point deficit at this stage of the race.

A big polling error could help Trump … or Biden

One of the misconceptions I hear about FiveThirtyEight’s forecast is that “it assumes that polls are right.” Actually, in some sense the whole purpose of the forecast is to estimate the chance that the polls are wrong. In 2016, the polls did show Clinton ahead, but between tight margins in tipping-point states and the large number of undecided voters, there was a fairly high probability — around 30 percent, according to our forecast — that Trump was going to win anyway.

So while a polling error is possible — indeed, our forecast assumes there’s likely additional error this year because of an uptick in mail voting — it would still take a bigger error than in 2016 for Trump to win.

Assume that current polls hold until Election Day, and subtract 3 points from Biden’s margin in every state (roughly the average error in swing state polls in 2016) … Biden still wins Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin fairly comfortably, and therefore, the Electoral College; he’d also be a slight favorite in Arizona. And as our friends at the Upshot have calculated, even if you had a polling error of the exact same magnitude in the exact same states as in 2016, Biden would still win, albeit narrowly.

Of course, nothing intrinsically rules out a larger polling error. We had one in 1948 — when Dewey didn’t defeat Truman, after all — and in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won in an epic landslide instead of the narrow margin that polls predicted.

But there’s no guarantee such an error would favor Trump. Historically, the direction of polling bias has not been predictable from cycle to cycle; the same polls that underestimated Trump in 2016 tended to underestimate Obama and Democrats in 2012, for instance. If anything, to the extent there are polling errors, they sometimes come in the opposite direction of what the conventional wisdom expects.

I want to spend more time on this topic in the coming days, so I won’t go on at too much length here. But for now, know that a 7-point Biden lead on Election Day could, indeed, turn into a 2-point Biden popular vote win where Trump narrowly wins the Electoral College.

As I wrote earlier in the piece, our forecast gives Trump about a 9 percent chance of winning an election held today despite his current deficit in polls — not bad when you’re 7 points down! But it’s about equally likely that a 7-point Biden lead could translate into a 12-point Biden win, in which he’d not only carry states like Georgia and Texas, but would also have a shot in South Carolina, Alaska and Montana.

Trump’s comments on respecting the election outcome are deeply worrisome, but it’s hard to estimate his chances of overturning the result

Hoo, boy. At some point I’m going to have to write a column about this too, I suppose. As I said at the outset, our forecast assumes that the election is free and fair — at least to the extent that past elections that we used to train the model were free and fair. (Throughout American history, there has always been plenty of voter suppression and voter disenfranchisement.)

But for now, let me advance a few propositions:

Even a small probability that the U.S. could become a failed or manifestly undemocratic state is worth taking seriously.
There are a wide range of things that Trump could attempt to do, many of which would be quite damaging to the country, but they are not necessarily equally likely to succeed.
Trump’s actions are much more likely to actually change the result of the election if the outcome is close, and right now, the most likely scenario is that Biden wins by a not-so-close margin.

Beyond that, it’s hard to estimate the probability that Trump could steal the election to any degree of precision. It requires, at a minimum, some knowledge of the probabilities in a free and fair election plus some knowledge of election law and how many votes could realistically come under dispute plus some theory of the institutional incentives of the Supreme Court and various other courts plus some opinions on how Congress might interpret the Constitution in the event of a disputed election. Maybe a panel of experts could get together and try to put together some reasonable bounds on the probability of various scenarios, but I don’t know that any individual could — certainly not me.

After Trump’s actions over the past few weeks, though, I wonder if there’s some tradeoff between Trump’s chances of winning legitimately and his willingness to engage in authoritarian rhetoric and behavior, even if it probably wouldn’t succeed at stealing the election. It’s not like this is coming entirely out of left field; Trump also said in 2016 that he wouldn’t necessarily respect the election results. But his recent statements have come at a moment of increasing peril for his campaign. It’s hard to know for sure, but I think Trump’s comments might be more tempered if he were 2 points ahead in Wisconsin instead of 7 points down.

It’s not easy to see which cards Trump has left to play or which contingencies could work in his favor enough for him to win — other than if the polls have been wrong all along.

Consider that Trump’s convention produced, at best, a very meager bounce in his favor. His attempt to pivot the campaign to a “law and order” theme fell completely flat in polls of the upper Midwest. He’s thrown the kitchen sink at Biden and not really been able to pull down Biden’s favorables. His hopes that we’d turn the corner on COVID-19 before the election are diminishing after cases have begun to rise again in many states. His campaign, somehow, is struggling to hold on to enough cash to run ads in the places it most needs to run them. The New York Times and other news organizations are likely to continue publishing damaging stories on his taxes and personal finances from now until the election. And now he’s seemingly lost the first debate.

If Trump intuits that he’s unlikely to win legitimately — it’s not hard to imagine him escalating his anti-democratic rhetoric and behavior. It’s also not hard to imagine this rhetoric further eroding his position in polls. It’s highly unpopular in focus groups (yes, take those with a huge grain of salt) and Trump’s polling over the past several days has been particularly bad (although there’s been a lot of other news, too).

So we could be headed for a vicious cycle where Trump increasingly gives up on trying to persuade or turn out voters and voters increasingly give up on him. But from a polling standpoint, this is one of the clearer elections to diagnose: Biden isn’t home-free, but he’s in a strong position. Nonetheless, the outlook for what’s actually in store for America has rarely been more cloudy.

The Debate Was One Of The Few Opportunities For Trump To Shake Up The Race. He Probably Didn’t.

In this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew reacts to the first 2020 presidential debate.

Politics Podcast: Trump Interrupts To Point Of Chaos In First Debate

By Galen Druke, Clare Malone, Nate Silver and Micah Cohen, Galen Druke, Clare Malone, Nate Silver and Micah Cohen, Galen Druke, Clare Malone, Nate Silver and Micah Cohen and Galen Druke, Clare Malone, Nate Silver and Micah Cohen












 












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In a late-night installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew reacts to a chaotic first presidential debate. It was one of President Trump’s few remaining opportunities to shake up the dynamics of the 2020 race, but his aggressive interruptions likely didn’t help him.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Will The First Presidential Debate Shake Up The Race?

Welcome to a special edition of FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): We’ve been saying for a while now that we’re in the thick of the presidential election, and it’s true, we are! We’ve just a little over a month now to go, and people are already busy casting ballots.

Today, though, marks Americans’ first real opportunity to see President Trump and Joe Biden go head-to-head in the first of three scheduled presidential debates. The candidates are expected to stick to six topics:

The Trump and Biden Records
The Supreme Court
COVID-19
The Economy
Race and Violence in Our Cities
The Integrity of the Election

The reality going into tonight is this: Donald Trump is fairly far behind Joe Biden in the polls, and has been for a while now. According to our forecast, he still has a very real chance of winning, but he is the underdog.

So let’s start there. Given that Biden is ahead (and has been all cycle), does he have more to lose tonight? Or no, Sarah, I disagree.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): Yeah, Sarah, I think that’s right. We shouldn’t overthink this: As long as everything stays the way it’s been going, that’s good for Biden. The debates, though, represent a chance for the status quo to be disrupted.

Now, I know that we’ve written in the past that the first debate typically helps the challenger — in this case, Biden.

But I’m not sure the ingredients are there for that this year.

sarah: Say more about that. Why not? Because Biden already has such a sizable lead nationally?

nrakich: For one thing, there are very few undecided voters this year. For another, I don’t think Trump has some aura of incumbency around him — he’s pretty unpopular.

Not to mention, both Democrats and Republicans are solidly behind their candidate this year, so there’s less room for party members to “come home” to the base.

I’ll also point out that the first debate in 2016 actually seemed to help Hillary Clinton (who was a member of the incumbent party). Clinton led in our national polling average by 1.4 points on the day of the first debate; a week later, her lead was up to 3.7 points.

So I’m not convinced that the “the challenger usually benefits” thing is an ironclad rule so much as it is just happenstance.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I might point out that Clinton wasn’t actually the challenger in 2016. There was no incumbent, although she was sort of a quasi-incumbent.

sarah: What does a situation in which Biden actually loses some standing tonight look like, you think?

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): The idea that Biden has the most to lose because he is ahead seems correct to me. I honestly think the worse thing for Biden is if he forgets something like when Rick Perry famously forgot about the federal agencies he was proposing to eliminate in a debate in the 2012 cycle.

One of the Trump team’s biggest arguments is that Biden is too old to be president, and kind of out of it mentally. So a major gaffe that is not really about policy and is easy for the media to cover that could be replayed in a way that might reach undecided voters, who are surely not watching this debate in full, would help Trump.

natesilver: Yeah. They’re setting expectations pretty low for Biden. On the other hand, if there are verbal gaffes — and those are fairly common from Biden — they’re priming folks to give it a lot of attention.

nrakich: Yeah, I agree with all that. I’d also say that Trump could help his cause by appearing prepared and shooting from the hip less than he usually does. Beyond that, if he can center the debate on typical Democratic-Republican partisan issues (rather than, say, the coronavirus, which Americans say 56 percent to 40 percent that he has mishandled), that might cause some reversion to the mean.

sarah: Yeah, this kind of segues into what are the respective candidates’ liabilities? Biden’s is that he’s not that great of a debater, right? That he makes some verbal gaffes, which support this idea that the Trump campaign has leaned into: He’s too old to be president. But doesn’t Trump have a lot of liabilities, too? Especially when you consider some of the risks he takes by not always playing by the book?

natesilver: What are the odds that Trump seems well prepared? He seems to think an off-the-cuff style works for him, but it’s not clear that he’s right.

nrakich: Biden had a few poor moments in the Democratic primary debates, although they obviously didn’t hurt him that much. I’d also point out that Biden kinda has a track record of shifting into a higher gear when the stakes are higher. For instance, his best primary debates were the ones before Nevada and South Carolina, when his candidacy was hanging by a thread, and he did very well in the 2008 and 2012 vice presidential debates, too.

In addition, Biden’s worst moments in the primary debates tended to happen at the end of a two- or three-hour debate. The fact then that tonight’s debate will last only 90 minutes could be good for him.

sarah: One thing I thought was interesting in that article Nathaniel was citing earlier is that regardless of who benefits from tonight, it really is the first debate that can shake up the race the most.

Polls don’t move that much after the first debate





Incumbent Party Average Polling Lead


Year
Post-First Debate
End of Campaign
Absolute Difference




1976
-3.0
-1.3
1.7


1980
-1.4
-3.8
2.4


1984
+17.0
+17.7
0.7


1988
+5.2
+9.0
3.8


1992
-13.5
-8.2
5.3


1996
+15.1
+12.1
3.0


2000
-1.5
-2.1
0.6


2004
+2.4
+1.0
1.4


2008
-6.0
-7.4
1.4


2012
+0.1
+1.5
1.4


Average


2.2

Sources: National Council On Public Polling, HuffPost Pollster

Do we think that’s still the case?

I ask, as we kind of didn’t see a convention bounce this year with everything going on, right?

natesilver: I think it makes sense to expect the first debate to be the most important one. It’s more of a novelty to see the candidates together on stage for the first time. And expectations tend to be better calibrated once the first debate has taken place.

Now, I would say that both Biden and Trump are relatively uneven debaters, so maybe the first debate won’t be as predictive of the remaining debates as normal.

nrakich: Yeah, the convention bounces were minimal, if they happened at all. That’s actually an interesting question: Is there a correlation between the size of the convention bounce and the size of any debate bounces?

I’d expect that the same reason we barely saw a convention bounce this year (high polarization) also makes it less likely that we’ll see a debate bounce.

Nate, maybe you’ve studied that?

natesilver: I mean, you’d expect polls to move less in general under high polarization. And that’s basically been true so far this year. The debate wouldn’t be an exception to it. And polls show that fewer voters than in the past say that the debates will matter to their vote this year.

nrakich: Yeah, Biden’s lead in our national polling average has been between 6.6 points and 9.6 points since early June. It’s been a remarkably steady race.

sarah: So, let’s shift gear to the topics — six in total — ranging from their respective track records to the integrity of the election. Tonight really will cover a wide range of issues, and I’m personally a little curious to see how much overlap there is with the other two debates (I’d imagine quite a bit).

But of the issues tonight’s moderator Chris Wallace and the debate commission picked, which do you think will dominate the evening? Or if you think each will be given truly equal time, which does Biden have the upper hand on? And which does Trump have the upper hand on?

For reference the issues are:

The Trump and Biden Records
The Supreme Court
COVID-19
The Economy
Race and Violence in Our Cities
The Integrity of the Election

nrakich: Well, Biden should have a clear advantage in the COVID-19 and race and violence in our cities segments. Polls have consistently shown that voters trust Biden more than Trump to handle those issues.

By a smaller margin, though, polls also show that voters trust Biden over Trump to pick Supreme Court justices, and of course Trump’s decision to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat now rather than wait until after the election is unpopular. But that segment may play out more along traditional partisan lines, which relatively speaking is good for Trump.

natesilver: I’d also say Biden as a clear advantage on the integrity of the election segment and that’s a place where Trump could get himself in a lot of trouble.

sarah: Yeah … part of me still can’t believe we wrote this article about what might happen if Trump won’t leave office quietly, but 2020: Where … anything is possible?

nrakich: Nate, do you mean like if Trump gets caught saying he won’t respect the election results again?

natesilver: Yeah. I don’t imagine that’s a very popular position, although casting doubt on the integrity of the election can also lower turnout.

nrakich: Yeah, and a debate is a more combative setting where Biden can really go after Trump if he makes a comment like that again — unlike the White House briefing room, an environment that is fairly tightly controlled by the administration.

perry: Biden’s vote in support of the Iraq War. The 1994 crime bill. He sponsored bills to slow down school integration. He voted for NAFTA. He didn’t handle the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings well. Do these things matter? I have no idea. But sharp questions about this pre-VP record seemed to annoy him during the Democratic primary and are a potential weak point now. I would expect Chris Wallace and Trump in particular to press him on the idea that he supported too much incarceration of Black men.

nrakich: Yeah, Perry, there was a lot of that at the Republican National Convention. On the surface it appeared aimed at winning over Black voters, but really it may have been more about winning over white voters who are concerned that Trump is racist. In the debates, it could maybe be an attempt to depress Black turnout.

sarah: Do you think one possible approach for tonight will be Trump trying to paint Biden as too far to the left?

natesilver: I think the debate is a hard moment to paint Biden as being some big leftist. He’s an old white guy who comes across as pretty affable. Better to make that argument in ads where you aren’t featuring Biden himself as much and can argue he’s some sort of Trojan horse.

sarah: What about how Biden will try to paint Trump?

Much of his campaign has been about winning back the soul of America, and Americans are really unhappy.

An AP-NORC poll from this summer also found 8 in 10 Americans say the country is heading in the wrong direction. That’s the highest it’s been since Trump took office.

perry: I think Biden will lean into the decency/character stuff, but I also think The New York Times’s reporting on Trump’s tax returns and Trump’s pick of Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court allow Biden to talk about policy — namely, that Biden will raise taxes on the super-rich and that Trump is trying to get the Affordable Care Act rolled back or Roe v. Wade overturned with Barrett on the court.

nrakich: Yeah, I actually think the debate will be a big indicator of how big of a role the tax returns story plays. If Biden really decides to go after Trump on it, it amplifies the story. If not, the news cycle turns over to whatever topic dominates the debate.

sarah: OK, knowing who “won” or “lost” a debate is difficult to answer. Clinton, for instance, got a lot of positive press coverage for how she handled herself in the debates in 2016, and Trump … won the election. So what if anything are you doing to “update your priors” going into the debate tonight?

natesilver: I think Clinton won the 2016 debates. She moved up in the polls after the debates. But debate bounces can be temporary.

But yeah, how much does the tax returns stuff stick? What about the election integrity segment? Does Biden make some big verbal gaffes or seem “out of it”? Those are all a bit obvious, I suppose, but they’re the things I’ll be most interested to watch.

nrakich: Exactly. I’ll just be reminding myself not to overreact to how the polls change after tonight. Mitt Romney also won the first debate in 2012, remember? But that momentum (our favorite word!) evaporated too.

perry: With so much of the electorate already clear on whom they will support, I think the key thing to watch for is: “What will move undecided voters?” I define that as people who are either soft Biden or Trump supporters, backing a third-party candidate or undecided. And those people aren’t likely to tune into a debate but will see whatever two to three moments get replayed on Facebook, shared on social media, etc.

So I think policy disputes aren’t likely to become big fodder. The most memorable thing from the debates four years ago was in the final debate when Trump got too physically close to Clinton — and this was after the “Access Hollywood” tape had come out.

Does anyone do anything in the debate that becomes a defining moment until the Oct. 7 VP debate?

nrakich: Yeah, to be honest, I remember Ken Bone more than anything Trump or Clinton did in those debates.

perry: People’s views on Trump are so well-defined, I suspect even among undecided voters. It will take something big to shift those.

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You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.