Why the Trump-Biden Race Is Much Like the 2016 Election (and Why Not)

By Alex Seitz-Wald for NBC News

It's the Republicans 'greatest hope and Democrats' greatest fear: that the 2020 election will be a repeat of the 2016 election, with an unexpected victory for Donald Trump despite polls and conventional wisdom pointing to Joe Biden he's on his way to the White House.

Four years ago this month,

;

Republicans fled the seemingly sinking ship and Lin-Manuel Miranda taunted Trump with a rendition of 'Never going to be president now' to the delight of fans of the

television

But, of course, Trump ended up winning, and his campaign says he can do it again.

[Donald Trump's campaign redoubled efforts in the Midwest of the country]

"Looking back at the 2016 election, most members of the media got the polls wrong and that's really important to understanding where we are today," former Trump campaign manager Corey told reporters. Lewandowski, predicting a pro-Trump explosion.

Some parallels between then and now are almost unsettling

.

The recording of 'Access Hollywood' and the news that Trump had COVID-19 both arrived on a Friday 32 days before the elections.

.

And there's even a late-breaking email controversy involving a laptop of unexpected origins, like the one that revived the Clinton email scandal days before the election.

This August 15, 2016 file photo shows then-Vice President Joe Biden and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag

1. The message

In 2016, Trump was an outsider.

Now he's the president, with a track record to answer for, and he faces voters who are generally unhappy with the state of the country.

Down the stretch four years ago, she shocked some observers by staying off Twitter and sticking to her message that

represented everything bad about Washington's political establishment.

This kept the spotlight on Clinton and served to mobilize voters who settled on Trump near the end.

[Stupefaction and a lot of sarcasm: Reactions to the first Trump-Biden presidential debate on the internet]

This year, the Trump campaign is pushing a similar message against Biden, but Trump himself is often distracted.

The president sometimes seems more interested in getting back into competition with Clinton than in going after his current opponent

.

He has not articulated a clear message for his second term.

And he seems to be competing against the media as well as against Biden.

After Thursday's forum hosted by NBC, the Trump campaign declared that he "firmly defeated NBC's Savannah Guthrie."

"During most of the general elections (in 2016), he was very disciplined and with a message. You knew very clearly what his campaign was about and what he would do as president. Whether you agreed or not, you knew," said the strategist Republican Matt Gorman.

"It's not the same this time."

2. The opponent

Biden is more popular, less divisive and more difficult to caricature than Clinton, whom Republicans had spent decades attacking, going back to her time as first lady in the 1990s.

"Hatred of the Clintons was ingrained in many of these voters," said Republican strategist Tim Miller.

"Some of it was sexism. Part of it was my fault. Sometimes it was her fault. She was being investigated by the FBI during the election."

Miller was one of Clinton's biggest antagonists in the run-up to 2016 when he worked for a Political Action Committee (PAC) known as the "super PAC" of the Republican opposition.

Now, he is the political director of Republican Voters Against Trump, which supports Biden.

[Biden holds double-digit lead over Trump in NBC News and WSJ poll]

Four years ago, polls showed that voters viewed Trump as more honest and trustworthy than Clinton, so his attacks on her resonated in a very different way than

.

And Biden's white working-class roots make him "culturally inconvenient" for Trump, as former Obama strategist David Axelrod has put it, making him attractive, or at least tolerable, to a broader range of Americans.

But like Clinton four years ago,

, with multiple events a day.

"I think you will see the president working flat out with Joe Biden down the stretch, like he did against Hillary Clinton," said Jason Miller, another Trump veteran in 2016 who has returned to advise the current campaign.

Harris vs.

Pence: the vice-presidential debate in 4 minutes

Oct. 8, 202004: 41

3. The map

The 2020 elections are being fought in more states than in 2016, when Democrats took for granted their superiority in the entities of the so-called 'blue wall', in some of which Trump ended up winning, such as in Wisconsin, which Clinton did not visit. .

Biden and allied Democratic groups are highly resourceful now and are competing to win both in the pendulum states of 2016 and others expected to be highly competitive this year, such as Arizona and Texas.

Trump carved his way to victory four years ago after winning in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by less than 80,000 votes combined.

This year, the president could repeat that path to obtain at least 270 votes in the Electoral College (the collegiate body that elects the new president),

.

Still, Trump won last time by getting unexpected people out to vote, and there are still millions of white-identifying working-class voters who might go to the polls to vote for him.

[Trump says he resurrected the coal industry but there are fewer miners today than at the beginning of his term]

The latest election also showed that even the most informed observers can pay attention to the wrong states,

.

"I wake up in the morning and try to think about what to worry about. Right now I'm wearing a 'Vote Biden' hat, but it really should say PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome)," said Bradley Beychok, President and co-founder of the

Democratic political action committee

.

"But in 2020, the Democrats are going to race to the end of the race to defeat Trump, so my fears for 2016 are diminishing day by day."

4. Surveys

Biden's lead is more stable than Clinton's.

Fewer undecided voters, fewer voters opting for third- or fourth-party candidates, and fewer who say they are willing to change their minds before November 3.

In fact, millions have already voted.

And most experts see no evidence that Biden's lead is overstated by "timid Trump voters" who hide their true preference from pollsters.

So it

.

Voters who disliked the top two candidates in 2016 mostly favored Trump.

However, this time around they seem to be siding with Biden, as well as people in 2016 who voted for candidates from parties other than the Republican or the Democrat.

, meanwhile,

, when they adequately predicted the popular vote at the national level but did not get the results from the pendulum states.

In addition, they are taking more polls, especially in the states, which provides a more accurate picture of the contest.

Arizona and Florida, two key states where the Latino vote can be decisive

Oct. 18, 202003: 15

Still, pollsters made some notable mistakes in the 2018 midterm elections, when they once again overestimated the strength of some Democratic candidates.

And participation, always difficult to predict, is an especially thorny issue during the coronavirus pandemic.

W. Joseph Campbell, professor at the American University and author of the recent book 'Lost in a Poll: Failure in American Presidential Elections', said that history shows that pollsters are often wrong in elections, but rarely do. for the same reason twice.

So there could be some unforeseen problem that pollsters missed after they learned from their mistakes in previous elections.

"It's not going to be a duplicate of what we saw in 2016," he added.

"All elections are different."

5. The electorate

The 2018 midterm elections showed that suburban voters did not vote for Trump as they did in 2016, which has helped Biden better position himself in traditionally Republican states like Arizona.

There is also evidence that older adults, a mainstay of Trump's coalition in 2016, are supporting him less now.

Meanwhile,

, when many of their voters, including tens of thousands of African Americans in key states, stayed home because they did not take seriously the threat Trump posed.

"People are continually organizing now," said Democratic strategist Lynda Tran.

"I'm not sure I've seen a presidential cycle where people are more motivated than they are now."

But some parts of the electorate have moved in favor of Trump.

The president appears to have made progress with Latinos, for example, and getting even a few percentage points in his favor could be important in close races.

[Hispanics have a worse image of Trump than the rest of the population, but it has improved compared to 4 years ago]

Republicans have also surpassed Democrats in voter registration this time due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant difference from 2016.

6. The parties

The two main political parties are more united than they were four years ago, when Trump faced the challenge of members of the Republican Party who asked him to withdraw from the race after the scandal of the 'Access Hollywood' recordings.

Clinton, for her part, struggled to attract a vote from progressives who supported Senator Bernie Sanders, some of whom voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Early voting continues to break records in the United States

Oct. 17, 202000: 33

If all of Stein's votes in Wisconsin had gone to Clinton, she would have won the state.

Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson got 4.4 million votes, much of the Republicans upset with Trump.

This year

far fewer voters plan to vote for a candidate from a third or fourth party.

The current Green and Libertarian Party nominees are far less visible or aggressive than Stein or Johnson and many of their potential supporters are expected to vote for Biden to stop Trump.

But the pandemic has given Republicans two possible new advantages.

First, they have continued to organize door-to-door, while Democrats have organized digitally, a big change from 2016, when Clinton had far more people on the ground than Trump.

Second, Democrats are counting on their voters to know how to order ballots by mail and send them back, adding a new dimension to their voting operations.

"The ballots don't come back by themselves," Trump's campaign manager Bill Stepien told reporters.

"We have the best territorial deployment ... in political history. Joe Biden has none."