Washington Post: "Biden leads Trump. So did Hillary Clinton. For Democrats, it’s a worrisome campaign deja vu"

“I am feeling anxious and trapped between a sense of unbridled optimism and sheer dread,” said Abington Township, Pa., Commissioner Bill Bole, who like many Democrats never thought Trump could beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and was stunned when he did.

Bole is not alone. Democrats went to the polls last time certain they would elect the first woman ever to become president, and were punched in the face with a Trump upset. This time they feel the punch coming from a thousand miles away. The worry is visceral and widespread, unassuaged by Biden’s lead in the polls.

With the benefit of hindsight, even the most partisan tacticians caution that the election result remains unknown. Polling, which has consistently shown Biden well ahead and en route to winning in the electoral college, is but a snapshot, with a built-in margin of error that can go either way or not at all. Voting may have begun, but there are still weeks to go, and voters have changed their minds before.

“I don’t know anyone in my Democratic pollster world who is sitting 100 percent comfortably or anything like that,” said Nick Gourevitch, a partner at Global Strategy Group who has been polling on the presidential race. “Biden seems in better shape, but it is still a polarized country and a Trump win is still within the realm of possibility.”

This uncertainty has become a point of leverage for Trump, who has always dismissed polls that reflect badly on him as “fake” efforts to suppress his voters. It has also become a rallying cry for Democrats, who have been warning the country — and their own voters — against complacency.

“The thing is, people don’t react logically. They react emotionally to this,” said Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor and a top Biden surrogate who has been trying to calm nervous Democrats by pointing to the better polling, lack of a strong third-party candidate, and some promising early-voting figures when compared with four years ago.

“And emotionally, you see the same scenario developing all over again.”

Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon has been telling donors, activists and voters to assume that the current polling leads will not last, even as the campaign also argues that Trump’s approach to campaigning with large crowds amid a surging pandemic is exactly the opposite of what swing voters want to see. She has said Biden does not have a double-digit lead.

“[N]ational polls tell us very little about the pathway to 270 electoral votes,” O’Malley Dillon wrote Saturday in a memo to donors. “We also know that even the best polling can be wrong, and that variables like turnout mean that in a number of critical states we are functionally tied.”

The Democratic super PAC Priorities USA has for a year included slides in its presentations predicting the election’s outcome in a shock scenario — in which Biden gets three percentage points less in White working-class support than polling suggests and the turnout among people of color is four percentage points lower than predicted.

As of Oct. 9, that scenario gave Biden 257 electoral votes and Trump 239 electoral votes, leaving three states — Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan — as too close to call. A jump ball to 270.

That doesn’t mean that Biden’s advantage is a mirage, just that the reality is more complicated and less conclusive than many would like at this point, say public opinion experts on both sides of the political divide.

Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to the Biden campaign, said Democrats have been much more cautious in 2020 in their polling assumptions, and intentionally less dependent on polling as a bellwether than the Clinton effort four years earlier.

“Adjusting for over representation of college graduates was critical, but many polls did not do it,” concluded a report after the last election from the American Association of Public Opinion Research, which included input from The Washington Post’s polling team.

Democrats have long argued that Trump’s ascent in the final days of that campaign was boosted by an announcement by FBI Director James B. Comey that the agency was looking anew at emails related to Clinton’s private server.

That circumstance will not afflict Biden, although Trump continues to talk about Clinton’s time in office and has recently fixated on emails allegedly contained in a laptop once owned by Biden’s son Hunter.

Biden enters the final weeks with a lead in Pennsylvania that is actually slightly narrower, according to the Post analysis, than it was for Clinton three weeks before the 2016 election.

Other factors that are hard to predict are what effect Trump’s massive investment in voter turnout and registration will play in the final result, and whether the president’s recent return to holding mass rallies will create a sense of momentum.

Democrats share some of this concern. They have watched their voters turn out early this year, embracing mail voting and other forms of early voting — but will not know until Election Day whether those early votes cannibalize the numbers they might otherwise have seen on Election Day. Republicans, by contrast, expect most of their voters to turn out on Election Day.

“We’re sort of like a high-jumper jumping as high as we can without yet knowing how high the bar will be because Republicans will set that on Election Day,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler said. “The sense among Democrats is a deep-rooted sense that anything could go wrong at every moment, so we have to do everything we possibly can.”

“I think a little bit of the reticence this year has to do with not knowing what lives between those polls,” he said of the surveys that keep coming in. “How many voices aren’t lining up for parades? Or phone banking? How many people are just waiting in the wings and are going to go quietly cast their vote and tip this one direction or the other?”