Where Biden and Trump stand in the final presidential election polls

Biden is the favorite. But Trump’s path to victory has not been entirely ruled out.

With polling of the 2020 race just about concluded, former Vice President Joe Biden is in an interesting position.

Biden’s national lead is large, and he has consistently led polls in states that would be sufficient to deliver him 270 electoral votes and therefore the presidency — most notably, the triad of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

But Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania — 1.2 to 4.7 percentage points, depending on the polling average — is not quite big enough for Democrats to be completely confident in it, particularly given what happened in 2016, when Donald Trump won the state and the polls underestimated Trump’s performance there by about 4 points.

Biden is also either narrowly ahead or about tied in polls of another set of swing states that he doesn’t even need to win: Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas. His leads are small (1 to 3 points in polling averages), and the others are pure toss-ups. If Trump sweeps these states or comes close to doing so, Biden really does need to hang on to Pennsylvania.

Still, it’s hard to point to many bad signs in the final polls for Biden. He’s clearly the favorite, with a 9 in 10 chance of winning, according to FiveThirtyEight. Indeed, if the polls are underestimating Biden’s strength by just 2 points, he’d win all the swing states listed above, and finish up with a 400+ electoral vote landslide.

And yet due to the Electoral College, Biden’s leads are not enough to dismiss Trump’s path to victory entirely. To get 270 votes, Trump needs to come out on top in nearly all the toss-up states, and snag Pennsylvania as well.