2020 Presidential Election Results & Exit Polls commentary thread

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

It’s curious that Biden now has a better price to win Nevada on PredictIt (95c) than he does to win Michigan (93c), where basically all the votes have been counted and Biden leads by almost 3%.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Progressive should be organizing “Call that race!” protests outside of each network’s HQ right now.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

At this point, it appears that Biden will win Arizona by less than 1%, but Pennsylvania by more than 1%.  Which means if you shifted every state 1% to the right, we would have actually had the 269-269 map.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

I doubt that’s going to allow AZ to be called.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

I thought this was supposed to be the last drop from Maricopa, but that seems like only half their remaining ballots.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

It seems like their should be some minimum number of ballots required to refer to something as a “dump”.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

So it sounds like about 45k left in Maricopa, 30k left in other Biden counties, and 40k left in Trump counties.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

How much will a headline this big shift the 538 model towards Trump?

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Fox calls it and actually bothers to call Nevada at the same time

Clearly the Fox decision desk really screwed things up by calling Arizona.  Under the same criteria, I’m sure they wanted to call NV a while ago, but didn’t want to be the only network to declare Biden the winner.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Susan Collins would, unironically, be a fairly good and qualified Transportation secretary in a Biden administration.

Why would Collins want this job? Is being Secretary of Transportation a more powerful position than being the median US Senator?

Maybe he could offer to appoint her to SCOTUS if she votes for court packing.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

https://twitter.com/NW_Horadam/status/1325439595367063552
https://twitter.com/NW_Horadam/status/1325444450433306626

That doesn't seem to be true.

The way I see it, the people voting for third parties are casting protest votes: not necessary that they actually believe what the Green or Libertarian believe or some other third parties.

If they can't vote for Green, they'll vote for Libertarian or some other third parties.

______________________________

all Georgia third parties: 1.24%

all North Carolina third parties: 1.23%

______________________________

all Michigan third parties: 1.52%

all Wisconsin third parties:1.49%

______________________________

Yeah, this this is definitely not true in Wisconsin.  The Greens would probably have gotten around .25% of the vote there this year, based on their nationwide share and the Green vote in WI in an anologous election like 2012.  And Biden won WI by more than double that amount.

The same would be true if anything close to Biden’s current margin holds up in Arizona.

Whether it is true on not in Georgia is irrelevant because the Green party is never on the ballot in Georgia.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

https://twitter.com/AK_OK/status/1325873031172874242

More runway for an unlikely Biden win? Gross awakens?

Gross would need to get about 68% of the remaining ballots to win.  That's not happening.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

https://twitter.com/umichvoter99/status/1325895522612285442

there is no bottom...

It seems like the networks should be able to call Georgia for Biden based on this statement alone.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

There is clearly a lot of ticket splitting going on everywhere.  Biden is going to win this election by like 7 million votes yet the House GOP picked up seats.  It makes me wonder if overhyping the blue wave actually hurt Democrats down ballot because moderates wanted a check on the Democratic Party.  Normally I would want this too but Democrats need complete power right now because the GOP has abused their right to have any.

There certainly is some siginificant ticket splitting in some races. But ticket splitting is not a necessary condition for the election results we saw.  

Remember that the current make-up of the House was the result of an D+9 election cycle.  This was certainly not a D+9 election cycle.  Biden only won by ~4 points, and so if the House Dems also only won by 4 points, you would expect them to lose quite a number of seats.  In fact, if you told most analysts that the Dems would win the national House vote by 4 points in 2018, most would think they were unlikely to ever win the majority in the first place due to gerrymandering.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

https://twitter.com/shadihamid/status/1324386750026993671
 

Is it because of Trump being a first Dove President in modern history of US och because of Muslims being more conservative than average American (abortion etc). Just don't start with racist "They like Macho" thing.

That's really not true since one of his first actions was to ban Muslims from the country and he later killed an Iranian leader. And don't freaking tell people what they can say in their posts. I am so sick of you people.

I do wonder if most Muslims in the US wouldn't support Trump's aggressive stance toward Iran, given that the majority of US Muslims are Sunni and the Iranian leadership is Shiite.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Around 50,000 new votes from Alaska were just dumped:

Trump 20,240
Biden 27,251

The totals from the state now are:

139,264 57.7% Trump
  91,497 38.9% Biden

This isn’t close to what Biden needs and it seems like they should be able to call this and the Senate race now.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

It's kind of ridiculous that Georgia has not been called. A recount is not changing 14K and we don't even know if there even will be one.

Right, isn't this the exact situation the designation of "apparent winner" was meant for?

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1326617805417017345

so much for it swinging hard D

Once again, South Carolina has proven itself to be the least swingy state in the country, voting almost exactly 15-16 points to the right of the nation for like the 9th election in a row.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Comparing the pre-election polls to the exit polls as well as the results, 2 things stand out in terms of what the pre-election polls, both at the state level and national level appear to have got wrong.

1. Consistently in state and national polls, the swing towards Trump among Hispanics was picked up as was his marginal gains with blacks and losses among college whites vs 2016, what the polls failed to capture was that there would be no large swing of non-college whites towards Biden, the only explanation is the polls were reaching a disproportionately anti Trump group of non-college whites.

2. The polls accurately captured how democrats would vote as well as how independents would swing to voting for Biden this year compared for Trump in 2016 what the polls missed was how many Republican defections there would be, the NYT/Siena poll in NV for example only had Trump winning Republicans by an 82% margin. For whatever reason the polls were reaching a particularly anti-Trump group of republicans.


Basically it seems the pre-election polls got two things wrong, they were sampling a disproportionately democratic leaning group of non college whites and they were sampling a disproportionately anti Trump group of Republicans, the two things can of course be related.

I guess it was something like the NYT calling random towns in PA and the non-college whites who picked up the phone were librarians who were democrats and that threw off their whole non-college white sample. Would not surprise me if pollsters oversampled the types of non-college whites who vote more democrat like librarians, teachers etc and under sampled those who vote Republican. 

Interesting theory! I have a couple of questions.

Does that track state by state? The polls were off more in WI, TX, and others than in GA or AZ. Is that because there are fewer of the subgroups you identified in the latter states?

I'm curious, too, about how this theory about sampling error fares when looking at down ballot races.

Regarding errors by region, if you take the final 538 polling average across the 7 northern swing states, MN, WI, MI, PA, NH, IA and OH, I assume OH will end up at a 7% margin for Trump and PA at a 1% margin for Biden, the polls overestimated Biden by 5.1% on average, these are the states with a lot of non-college whites.

In the 6 southern/western swing states, NC, GA, TX, FL, AZ and NV, polls overestimated Biden by an average of 3.3%, so the polling error was roughly 2% smaller in the states with fewer non-college whites but it was still fairly large.

One thing that was present in 2016 that disappeared this year was in some swing states Clinton outperformed her polls like Nevada, this year, in all 13 swing states Trump outperformed his polls, in that sense 2020 represented a systematic failure in polling unlike 2016 where polls erred in some swing states in the other direction.

It’s worth remebering that polls have consistently for several cycles now underestimated Democrats in NV and AZ (and to a slightly lesser extent TX).  So it seems plausible to me that whatever was causing pollsters to underestimate Trump in the Midwest was also happening in the Southwest, but that this was partially counteracted by the factors that traditonally underestimate Dems in the Southwest.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Wisconsin is not the tipping point state!  Or at least it is not the sole tipping point state.  If Trump won WI, AZ, and GA, he’d only be at 269 EV, as would Biden.  WI and PA are equally tipping points. 

(I realize most people believe Trump would win a House vote, but I don’t think we can assume that for for the purpose of historical calculations.)

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

So Biden might win 5 states by 1 million or more

California
New York
Illinois (maybe?)
Massachusetts
Maryland (maybe?)

Trump's best state looks like Tennessee at 700k or so.

Also note that Biden's margin in California is around 5 million.

This is kinda important, it shows how packed up Democratic voters really are, it's actually gotten worse since 2016.   It's now actually feasible to see the Democrats winning the popular vote by 4-5% and the Republicans still winning the Electoral College.

Is this really sustainable?   Would the government have real legitimacy with such a loopsided flipped result?   The elected National Leader winning significantly fewer votes than his opponent and still being elected to office? 

It sounds like a broken system to me.

Could you imagine the chaos if Dems won by the NPV by 7 and lost the EC, it would be ugly.

There would be no chaos; Dems would just lie down and take it like they always do.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Does anyone know if there is a list of which states include mail-in ballots with their precinct vote totals?  I know a lot of states don’t, and I fear this is going to create huge problems for calculating things like PVI this year.