Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at Delaware State Universitys student center in Dover, Delaware, on June 5, 2020.
CNN  — 

Our new CNN/SSRS poll jumps right off the screen: Former Vice President Joe Biden has 55% to President Donald Trump’s 41%. Now, any one poll could be deemed an outlier. But let’s get something straight: Biden’s clearly on the upswing in high quality live telephone polling like CNN’s.

In fact, Biden’s in his strongest position this year nationally.

Take a look at the five live interview polls out over the last 10 days: ABC News/Washington Post, CNN, Monmouth University, NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist College and NBC News/Wall Street Journal. The average has Biden up by a 52% to 42% spread, which means Biden is clearly over 50% – a mark Hillary Clinton never reached this late in the campaign. None of the recent polls have the margin at less than 7.

Now look at what happens when you take a rolling five poll average back to the beginning of this year. Not once had Biden’s advantage in this rolling average hit higher than 8 points before Monmouth published their poll last Wednesday. Since then, it’s been at least 9 points. The average of all the polls before the last 10-day period had been a fairly consistent 6 points.

The fact the margin has jumped makes a lot of sense, given the events of the past few weeks and months. Voters disapprove overwhelmingly of Trump’s performance on the coronavirus pandemic and race relations.

Still, when you see large jumps like this, even in the average, caution is warranted. Things could shift again. As I’ve noted before, we’re still months before the election. There is plenty of time for Trump to come back.

Moreover, big events (a pandemic or massive protests would qualify) can sometimes cause nonresponse bias. That is, one side becomes more likely to respond to surveys than the other side. Nonresponse bias does not seem to be happening here. Biden’s advancement seems to be real, not a statistical artifact.

The three biggest movers among the most recent polls, ABC News/Washington Post, CNN and Monmouth, all show that Democrats make up about the same percentage of respondents as they previously did. The average shows no difference.

So what’s changed? Biden is dominating with Democrats in a way he hasn’t before.

Biden holds an astounding 96% to 2% among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents in CNN’s poll. CNN’s previous poll put Biden at 91% and Trump at 6%.

The ABC/Washington Post poll, right in line with the average of recent polls, had Biden up by a 93% to 4% margin among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents in the most recent poll. Back in March, Biden was at 86% to Trump’s 11%.

Meanwhile, Trump’s still getting about 90% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in both the CNN and ABC News/Washington Post polls. He hasn’t expanded that margin over the last few months, like Biden has among Democrats.

Put another way, the candidate who is employing a base first strategy (Trump) is actually finding that it’s the other candidate (Biden) who is doing better with his own base now. And given that there are more Democrats in the country than Republicans (a fact that has been true for the last 50 years), it’s a recipe for the large margins we’re seeing Biden put up now.

Trump needs this race to change because even if the polls are off by as much as they were in 2016 (and the national polls got the margin within 2 points), Biden would emerge victorious given the current numbers.