With a stable national lead and a bevy of polling showing him running significantly better with northern white voters than Hillary Clinton performed four years ago, Joe Biden appears to be turning back the clock a bit on the United States’ political transformation.
Namely, after Clinton hemorrhaged white voters in northern small town and rural areas in 2016, Biden appears to be bringing some of those voters back into the Democratic fold while also improving on Clinton’s margins with white suburbanites. If this pattern holds in the actual results, it could pay major dividends for Biden in the Great Lakes region, where American presidential elections are so often won and lost and where the electorates in the competitive states are whiter than the nation as a whole.
We have several Electoral College changes this week, all in this region. We are moving Minnesota from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic. We are also moving its neighbor, Wisconsin — the decisive state in the 2016 presidential election — from Toss-up to Leans Democratic. And, finally, we’re moving Iowa and Ohio, both of which voted for Donald Trump by margins approaching double digits in 2016, from Leans Republican to Toss-up.
These changes push Biden over the 270 electoral vote mark in our ratings, shown in Map 1.