All good news is relative at this point, so here’s the good news today: There aren’t many *state* polls this week showing the bottom falling out for Trump over the past week. For instance, a poll of Wisconsin from the respected outfit at Marquette Law that was released within the last few hours shows him within five of Biden, 46/41. Is it encouraging for an incumbent to be at 41 percent in a swing state less than a month from Election Day? It is not. But could something happen between now and then to erase a five-point lead? Sure. Wisconsin isn’t lost yet.

The national picture is different.

If you follow election polls, you know that Rasmussen tends to have the rosiest numbers for Trump among all of America’s major polling outfits. (Arguably it’s been overtaken on that score by Trafalgar, but that’s a subject for another day.) If Rasmussen has the race Biden +12 then maybe it’s time to panic.

The latest national telephone and online survey finds Biden leading President Trump 52% to 40% among Likely U.S. Voters. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate. Another four percent (4%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Last week, following Trump’s announcement that he was nominating federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court, Biden moved from a narrow one-point lead to eight points ahead. The race had narrowed over the previous three weeks. Biden has now cleared the 50% mark for two weeks in a row, while Trump has fallen to his lowest level of support since the first week of White House Watch in early July.

It’s interesting that Rasmussen saw big movement towards Biden after the Barrett announcement, not Trump’s widely panned debate performance three days later. Other polling suggests that voters are warming up to Barrett. Maybe trying to fill that seat so late in the race is more of a liability for the GOP than we realize.

We’ve spent the past three days flagging national polls showing Biden suddenly up double digits and pronouncing each of them an outlier, but the trend is now unmistakable. Of six national surveys conducted partly over the weekend, after Trump had been hospitalized for COVID, four of them have the Democrat up 10 or more and another has him up nine. Look at the far right side of this graph tracking the last three months of national polling.

The date on which the two lines began to diverge, with Biden rising and Trump sinking, was September 29 — the day of the first debate. Increasingly it seems like Trump did himself real damage there by interrupting Biden constantly, and then that bad impression was reinforced by another bad impression a few days later when he and various people in his orbit began testing positive for coronavirus.

There’s an exception to the general stasis in state polling too. This afternoon Quinnipiac dropped a new poll putting Biden up double digits in, of all states, Florida and Pennsylvania. No one’s taking that seriously — Florida’s always close, Quinnipiac’s polling of the state was terrible in 2018, and no other pollster has Biden leading by anything like that margin there. (A new one today from Reuters has him up four.) But it’s worth noting that their last poll of the state in early September found the race a plausible 48/45 at the time. Laying aside the outlandish topline number, today’s poll suggests that there’s been some sort of shift towards Biden in the state since then. And that’s borne out by other surveys lately. Again, note the far right side of the graph.

Care to guess on which date Trump’s numbers started to tank? Right. September 29, the day of the debate. Quinnipiac’s poll finds 44 percent of Floridians thought worse of Trump after the debate compared to nine percent who thought better of him. Since then, one poll of the state has had the race tied but the remaining four have Biden ahead by four points or better.

It’s hard to imagine it won’t tighten up in the final weeks of the race, but it was also hard to imagine half the White House coming down with COVID in October and yet here we are.

I can’t overstate the significance of this. Two red-state Rs, on consecutive days, telling me they’re seeing poll numbers they never thought were possible.

Their shared conclusion: Trump’s standing w/ white college+ women threatens to tank the entire party down-ballot on Nov 3. https://t.co/6HGhHtR3DI

— Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) October 7, 2020

Nate Silver offers this snapshot of the state of play in swing states:

Our current polling averages in the most likely tipping-point states:

National: Biden +9.4

PA: Biden +6.9
FL: Biden +4.5
WI: Biden +6.9
MI: Biden +7.7
AZ: Biden +4.6
NC: Biden +2.3
MN: Biden +9.5
NV: Biden +6.6
OH: Biden +0.7
GA: Biden +1.0https://t.co/cy51vc5isJ

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 7, 2020

All Biden needs in that group are Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. (Assuming he holds Nevada and Minnesota, that is, which seems likely.) Even if there were a polling error in each of those states in Trump’s favor of six points, Biden’s margins right now are such that he’d still win the presidency based on Silver’s numbers, albeit narrowly.

One other big “tell” that the national picture has moved left is that states that were easy wins for Trump four years ago are now competitive. Quinnipiac has Biden up five in Iowa, a state Trump won in 2016 by nearly 10 points. That’s a bit higher than the average there, which has Biden up 1.4, but not wildly so. Likewise, the NYT has Biden up by one in Ohio today. Trump won there by eight against Clinton. Not all swing states are seeing a dramatic nine- or 10-point shift from four years ago — Florida is Florida — and in some states, like Wisconsin, the shift appears more modest. But there is a shift, and in light of how narrow Trump’s margins were in 2016, it’ll be fatal to his candidacy if he doesn’t come up with a way to undo it in 27 days. The Rasmussen survey and other national polls this week suggest that he’s moving in the wrong direction.

I’ll leave you with this, from the chairman of the Democrats’ most prominent Super PAC. The left’s great fear at this moment in time is simple complacency. The more Biden’s gaudy polling leads pile up, the greater the risk that his more reluctant supporters will conclude, “He doesn’t need me to turn out after all.” Over the next few weeks, we may find Trump and many of his harshest Democratic critics all suddenly singing from the same hymnal for very different reasons: Stop believing the polls and go vote.

I rarely engage in polling twitter, but will chime in here to simply say we are not up 11 in Florida and 13 in Pennsylvania.

Now let’s all just get back to work. https://t.co/FUmtdB3Y7D

— Guy Cecil (@guycecil) October 7, 2020