Where the race stands, 2 days before Election Day

But the overall thrust of them is pretty unmistakable.

On Saturday night, supporters of President Trump were suddenly heartened and some supporters of Democratic nominee Joe Biden were suddenly panicked over the latest poll from Iowa’s most authoritative pollster, Ann Selzer. The poll for the Des Moines Register shows Trump leading the state by seven points — his best poll in the state since March and significantly better for him than any recent high-quality Iowa poll, most of which show Biden leading.

Was there suddenly a sizable shift toward Trump in the closing days of the election, a la 2016?

Well, just about all the other new polls suggest not — and even that Biden may have expanded his leads.

In neighboring Wisconsin, for instance, a CNN poll shows Biden ahead by eight (52 to 44) and a New York Times-Siena College poll shows him up by 11 points (52 to 41). Both margins are larger than his previous average lead.

And then there are the other two decisive states that Trump won narrowly in 2016. In Pennsylvania, the Times-Siena poll has Biden up six (49 to 43), while a Washington Post-ABC News poll has him up seven (51 to 44). And in Florida, a Times-Siena poll has Biden up three (47 to 44) and the Post-ABC poll has Trump plus two (50 to 48).

That’s a lot of new polling, but the takeaway from virtually all of it is the same: In the states that decided the 2016 election, where Trump won by about one point or less, the picture is about as friendly to Biden as it has been for many weeks. He is still favored to win the Midwest/Rust Belt trio of Michigan/Pennsylvania/Wisconsin, and Florida — the one key state that hasn’t shifted this year as much as the others and has long remained close — remains close. Florida is key, but if Biden sweeps that trio, it’s game over in all likelihood.

What’s more, in another key state that Trump carried last time, Arizona, Biden leads by four in a CNN poll and by six in a Times-Siena poll. This is a state that Trump won by 3.5 points in 2016. So another significant shift toward Biden, relative to 2016.

It’s also important to put that Iowa poll in the same context. Iowa is not likely to be the decisive state — because of its six electoral votes, yes, but also because this is a state, judging by 2016, that should be firmly in Trump’s column if he’s to win. He won the state back then by more than nine points, after all.

So even if he is up by seven, that suggests he has actually lost a little bit of ground from 2016, which he can’t really afford to do given how tight that race was. And even if you’re cherry-picking that poll and ignoring all the many others, you’re not necessarily cherry-picking a poll that shows Trump winning reelection.

If there’s one thing we could be talking about most of all once the final results are in, it might be the suburbs. And new polls bear that out.

The Times-Siena poll in Arizona, for instance, shows Biden actually winning the all-important Phoenix-based Maricopa County by six points. That’s not only a reversal from 2016, when Trump carried the area by five points, but it would also be the first time since 1948 that a Democrat had won the county. (Maricopa County is home to about 6 in 10 Arizona voters.)

So, too, go the Philadelphia suburbs. There, Biden leads 66 to 29 in the Post-ABC poll and 57 to 34 in the Times-Siena poll. That compares favorably with just a 13-point edge for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

A Fox News poll released this weekend echoed the above on the national level, with Biden leading Trump by seven points in the suburbs, after Trump carried them by four points in 2016 — an 11-point swing. And this isn’t some small demographic; it was nearly half of all votes (49 percent) in the country in 2016 — significantly larger than both urban (34 percent) and rural areas (17 percent).

Trump has attempted some, well, novel appeals to suburban voters. He has warned of impending doom for them stemming from racial unrest and low-income housing, and he has (apparently jokingly) pleaded with suburban women to like him, as polls have shown increasingly that they don’t. These will be some of the most closely watched demographics after Election Day, as the two parties seek to glean lessons about how our politics might have realigned in the Trump era.

Given the unprecedented turnout we’ve seen in early voting, the question is who is expanding the electorate. And these new polls are the latest data to suggest that it’s more Biden than Trump.

According to the Times-Siena polls, voters who didn’t cast ballots in 2016 but plan to (or already have) this time favor Biden by seven points in Arizona, 12 points in Pennsylvania, 17 points in Florida and 19 points in Wisconsin. And, to be clear, these are sizable chunks of voters: about 1 in every 5 voters in the first three states and 11 percent of all voters in Wisconsin.

And lest Democrats worry that these voters might not actually turn out, given they didn’t do so in 2016: Two-thirds of them say they have already voted in Arizona and Florida, while 56 percent say the same in Wisconsin. (The number is lower — 36 percent — in Pennsylvania.) These are not just votes that Democrats hope to add; in most cases, these are votes they already have.

The polls come on top of data collected by TargetSmart that has already shown that voters who haven’t previously cast ballots but did so early this time tilt toward Biden by similar margins. If Biden’s edge in new voters holds, he wins.