Trump running ahead of 2016 in battleground state polling...

The question is whether pollsters learned their lesson in 2016 or don't care to?

Day after day after day after day you hear and see the same tired stuff from the same tired people proclaiming that Biden is a shoe-in for a November win, and according to some (Nate Silver for one) there is a fairly reasonable chance that Trump will suffer the largest incumbent loss since Jimmy Carter. 

Jimmy Carter lost 489-49 in the ECV and by about ten points nationally. 

Why people like Nate Silver are taken seriously when they compare Trump to Carter isn't much different from why people take Nate Silver seriously to begin with. Silver tells liberals what they want to hear. He has never been a "serious" prognosticator in terms of getting it right. He proves that assertion by having a long term 100% rate of error in favor of Democrats. Every time he has projected wrong, it's projecting a Democrat. Never once, in his career, has he projected a Republican to win that didn't win. The statistical odds of that happening in an honest objective fashion is a fraction of a percentage. 

I would argue that our media polling is much the same monster. Maybe once over the past couple of decades of elections has there been a time when Democrats outperformed their polling. In fact, it's so commonplace that Democrats underperform their polling, that many projectionists literally factor it into their calculations. 

Now we can look at polling averages showing Biden up by six or seven points nationally and by four to five points in Battleground states and believe it must mean something. Well it certainly means "something". It means that the 2020 polling is statistically running almost identical to the 2016 polling and where it differs, it actually differs to the degree that Hillary had better (not worse) polling. 

I have read the opposite. In fact I believe that Nate Silver and Harry Enten (from 538)  himself have both written quite a bit demanding that Biden is running ahead of Clinton. Keep in mind, however, that 538 polling stats are "adjusted" by certain assumptions regarding pollsters and Silver and Enten remain convinced that there are many, many pollsters who are biased to the right (more in fact than seem to be biased to the left).  

But RCP and others who simply take the polling numbers as they are, continue to show a different story. They shows that polling is running slightly better for Trump in 2020 than it did in 2016. 

Now many will argue that other factors led to Hillary's decline. Email scandal, rumors of health concerns, etc, etc... But it's highly unlikely that in a race where the two people running are pretty much night and day that very many people are actually changing their minds. I don't believe that the 2016 would have been much different if the actual voting has been done in October or if it had been done in December. The same basic underlying factors would have remained exactly the same.

2020 is likely the same thing. The potential for people changing their minds rests almost entirely on how Joe Biden performs over the next 10 weeks or so. If he continues to hide and the media continues to cover for them, you will get the same drum beat that you got at the end regarding Clinton (she was seriously ill and her people were covering it up). If he comes out into the public and has trouble working beyond a teleprompter and continues to seem cognitively troubled, then it works like it did when Hillary was shown falling down on numerous occasion. Both those scenarios bode well for Trump (either Biden remaining hidden or reliant on teleprompters will reinforce the notion that he is not up to the task).

On the flip side, Biden could cement his leads a little bit by coming out in public, answering question off the cuff like every other politician in history has, and appear competent, alert, and up to the task.

Like 2016... I have no clue what to think about the polling. In 2016 I refused to even make projections based on the fact that (up until the last week to ten days) that polling seemed completely fictional. It turned out that I was correct. Both not to rely on the 2016 polling to make predictions and that the 2016 polling showing Clinton with huge double digit leads were media driven fiction.